Best 147 quotes in «literary quotes» category

A castaway adrift on my own little island - rich and with my family along with thousands of beautiful, drunken tourists to keep me company.” - excerpt from Confessions of an Internet Pornographer.

A drop of darkness above me hung,within me ruined Rome,within me demolished Rome, where those lands my dream would well travel, before that I want to die without blame,so let me see ten thousand moons to Dream.

A girl without braids is like a city without bridges.

A garden is never finished. In that sense it is like the human world and all human undertakings.

All I want is to sleep--to dream. Life is better in dreams.

A library always housed a trove of undiscovered friendships and forays, and a bookstore, a place where those temporary connections might become a constancy, must always hold a charm over any scholar’s heart.

All experiences are stories to be told and must be written.

Ah thrills of my soul is not yet perished,for a flame aglow its spirit of thoughts,and my words will garland the most admired beauty of both seen and the unseen hearts.

All good writers are thieves. The best get away with a heist.

A mystery reader, confronted with a large mass of sudden detail, is going to go—subconsciously, at least—”Aha! somewhere in all of this the writer has planted a Clue!”, and look for that; a reader trained exclusively in mainstream literary fiction is likely to say, “Aha! all this emphasis must point to something of Thematic Importance!”, but an experienced reader of science fiction is going to assume that he or she is meant to take all of those details and out of them construct a world. Which is why the writer of a science-fiction mystery with literary ambitions is trying to do a quadruple somersault off the trapeze without a net.

A more popular book on the market was called, “Verdad for Our Family,” in which Fergus’s older brothers Angus and Wallace Smith explained in detail how their youngest sibling had warped facts, stolen ideas, memories, and identities from others, told outright lies about family members and misrepresented living and deceased people to advance himself. The whole town of Garlick bought a copy of that book, and Angus and Wallace soon found themselves on the Texas bestsellers list and steadily gaining popular momentum.

A rain forest springs from the droppings of animals and grows greater than any cultivated garden; likewise, a great mass of literary skill springs from the droppings of writers that cross our minds through the reading we do.

And he has a Poet,but you are unlucky to hear that Pensive song.

And in a land accustomed to so much anguish, Chase tried to be careful with words. His soccer moms began assigning nicknames during the first day of official practice: Difom, Kakas, Kochma, and Maldyok, which roughly translated to Deformed, Carcass, Nightmare, and Bad Eye. He made a new rule regarding nicknames.

And what is gossip anyway?Just fragments of sad accounts, maneuvered and mutilated year after year for our sinful pleasure.

As it stands there is a very strong argument that as the book trade becomes increasingly corporate it's our literary heritage that is at risk - a vital part of our culture.

A woman must prefer her liberty over a man. To be happy, she must. A man to be happy, however, must yearn for his woman more than his liberty. This is the rightful order.

A smile is just the contortion of a face

A slippery fish, flashing scales in the water and a noble fighter on the line, but dull as lead at the bottom of the boat.

. . . a statement that is repugnant to one's beliefs can be as true as one that is pleasurable.

A writer is lost when he grows interested in such questions as 'what is art?' and 'what is an artist's duty?

Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised. When we talked, our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths, staggered like drunken men. Because we were not using our languages we said things we did not mean; what we really wanted to say remained folded inside. trapped. In America we did not always have the words. It was only when were were by ourselves that we spoke in our real voices. When we were alone we summoned the horses of our languages and mounted their backs and galloped past skyscrapers. Always, we were reluctant to come back.

Clear the blue skies aery dome,rosy the sun’s cheek,he clouds unfastened sway,the smiling gush of creek,the tiny fishes awake from sleep, the unseen moves of the dryad,ha spirit in me driven!

CONGRATULATIONS DL Havlin! Your entry, "There are No Lights in Naples", an unpublished short fiction - flash fiction genre category, is a finalist for the 2016 Royal Palm Literary Awards competition!

Could a literary life be referred to with the iambic pentameter of, say, harnessing wind power, transplanting hearts or saving the whales. Or did it necessitate the sombre and monotonous dirge of software, priority banking or turbine building.

Darkness crept through. Shadows pried at doors, teased dull edges of recollections that never quite took hold. Memories that would have shriveled under the blinding sun of daylight. And reason.

Especially on rainy nights like this, they would congregate under the bridge, all the boys from nowhere, the boys who lived nowhere, who had nowhere else to go.

During the Government’s recent overhaul of GCSEs, I was asked to join a consultative group advising on the English Literature syllabus. It quickly became clear that the minister wanted to prescribe two Shakespeare plays for every 16-year-old in the land. I argued, to the contrary, that there should be one Shakespeare play and one play by anybody except Shakespeare. It cannot be in Shakespeare’s interest for teenagers to associate him with compulsion, for his plays and his alone to have the dreaded status of set books.

Era crédula, aunque lo negara, seguía creyendo en cuentos de hadas, por más que la vida trataba de decirme a gritos que las cosas no funcionaban de esa manera.

Every story reads on multiple levels to convey a greater, more intricate message, and it's the reader's role to tap into that.

Evil should not be, Detective Vera. Truly never can be. But in defining it as such, an inherent human bond with negativity confirms its very existence. Its mere acknowledgement cancels its credibility. Evil is nothing—the lack of anything of substance— made concrete as a balance to everything else. Evil is not, yet it is a part of each human, because humans welcome its participation in their lives. They speak of it in anger or disgust, fear or even wonder— the most appropriate response— giving it a stronger foundation with every passing thought it distorts. Though within their pliable minds, they welcome it with the glee of the ignorant, nurturing the unthinkable, thinking the unimaginable, imagining the most horrid, abysmal designs, embellishing them with an insidious veracity until evil is as substantial a reality as their next breath. I strive for something else, beyond evil’s claustrophobic clutches. I strive to transcend evil by becoming pure nothing. I strive as my followers strived.” He paused, his ideology a cancer, spreading… “I am, yet I strive to not be. Do you understand, comrade?” His tone suggested fellowship, disciples of the same obscene religion. ...

Fate bring two people together and it is love's job to keep them there

...forever meant different things to people at different times. They could imagine what infinity looked and felt like as much as they wanted, but could never truly grasp its meaning nor bear its full weight.

For a moment Carl tried to picture everything in his mind, and then it happened. Somewhere inside of him, where cause and effect were not weighted against each other, and where logic and explanations never challenged consciousness, in that place where thoughts could live freely and played out against each other - right there in that spot, things fell into place, and he understood how it all fitted together

Herald Loomis, you shining! You shining like new money!

He takes a draw on a cigarette, blows out a smoky ghost. I reach to catch the phantom in my hands, but it eludes me. I've been trying to catch a ghost for as long as I can remember.

He was now Fergus Escondido-Smith: poet, mystic, and sage extraordinaire.

His eyesight wasn’t as keen as it had been, but he knew a changing mind when he saw it.

His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him in and out of quite a few bedroom doors.

How easily such a thing can become a mania, how the most normal and sensible of women once this passion to be thin is upon them, can lose completely their sense of balance and proportion and spend years dealing with this madness.

How stark everything became, at the end, all the wishes for one's children distilled by the world's swift cruelty into the desperate hope that death would take them fast.

I am a bomb but I mean you no harm. That I still am here to tell this, is a miracle: I was deployed on May 15, 1957, but I didn’t go off because a British nuclear engineer, a young father, developed qualms after seeing pictures of native children marveling at the mushrooms in the sky, and sabotaged me. I could see why during that short drop before I hit the atoll: the island looks like god’s knuckles in a bathtub, the ocean is beautifully translucent, corals glow underwater, a dead city of bones, allowing a glimpse into a white netherworld. I met the water and fell a few feet into a chromatic cemetery. The longer I lie here, listening to my still functioning electronic innards, the more afraid I grow of detonating after all this time. I don’t share your gods, but I pray I shall die a silent death.

I believe a family just isn’t complete without skeletons. My dearest momma clean bit off my daddy’s nose right around the time they divorced.

I believe in moderation. But I wouldn't overdo it.

I can't bear literary snobbery.

If these walls could talk, the buildings would stutter, wouldn't remember their names.

I hardly know her but whenever I see her I lose my mind. I know I should run away, but I can’t. “That’s called sexual attraction, honey,” Max said. “It’s very nice. But be careful. It can burn you bad. Believe me I know.

I needed words, lots of words to think about while I was going about the rest of the day. And I didn't want anything affected. I wanted nothing to do with those Romance languages. I wanted clipped words, full of common sense. Thoughts to wear beneath my thoughts. Allow, express, oath, vow, dismay, matter, splash, mollify. I liked those words. I liked saying them. I still do.

I know I will always be attracted to the unknown as it does often verify what I am or what else I could be.

{Letter from Fawcett to the great Robert Ingersoll, 1894} I do so wish, that, in all these big questions, literary men would take you more for a guide than they do, or seem to do. You have, of course, an immense constituency; but your love of letters and your deeply poetic spirit render you worthy of a far greater reverence and respect from writers than it seems to me that you receive. I want the brilliancy of your thought to penetrate our literature profoundly and permanently. But of course that will come. The younger generation of writers cannot escape you any more than the air they breath. You will, indeed, be the air they breath, -- and hence, in many cases, if not all, their inspiration. Especially should the poets love you and sit at your feet. If you die before you see the change, I believe that those who now love you and survive you will see how much of the mere pietistic rubbish in modern poetry has been gradually yet surely swept away by the mighty besom of your fearless and noble intellect.