Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

Whoever is new to power is always harsh.

Whoever has trusted a woman has trusted deceivers.

Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it.

Whoever could properly characterize Goethe's Meister would have actually expressed what is the timely trend in literature. He would be able, as far as literary criticism is concerned, to rest.

Who then may trust the dice, at Fortune's throw?

Whomever you're going to interview, you have to be interested in what it is you want to know from them. You have to be interested in the subject.

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

Who would not give up wit for power and beauty?

Whoso will pray, he must fast and be clean, And fat his soul, and make his body lean.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

Why do they put the Gideon Bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late...?

Why harass with eternal purposes a mind to weak to grasp them?

Why would anyone steal a shopping cart? It's like stealing a two-year-old.

Will it, and set to work briskly.

Wine has lit up for me the pages of literature, and revealed in life romance lurking in the commonplace.

Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?

Winning Nobel imposed on me a lifestyle to which I am not used and which I would not have preferred.

With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.

Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.

With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.

Wishing of all employments is the worst

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge: NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE.

Without civilization, we would not turn into animals, but vegetables.

Without charm there can be no fine literature, as there can be no perfect flower without fragrance.

With renunciation life begins.

Without literature my life would be miserable.

Without literature, life is hell.

Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.

Woman and men of retiring timidity are cowardly only in dangers which affect themselves, but the first to rescue when others are in danger.

Wit is the lowest form of humor.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.

Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.

Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large.

Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Worried about being a dull fellow? You might develop your talent for being irritating.

Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven't had many complaints.

Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.

Words are but pictures of our thoughts.

Words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.

Words empty as the wind are best left unsaid.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones.

writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.