Best 147 quotes in «literary quotes» category

Walking into a bookshop is a depressing thing. It’s not the pretentious twats, browsing books as part of their desirable lifestyle. It’s not the scrubby members of staff serving at the counter: the pseudo-hippies and fucking misfits. It’s not the stink of coffee wafting out from somewhere in the building, a concession to the cult of the coffee bean. No, it’s the books. I could ignore the other shit, decide that maybe it didn’t matter too much, that when consumerism meets culture, the result is always going to attract wankers and everything that goes with them. But the books, no, they’re what make your stomach sink and that feeling of dark syrup on the brain descend. Look around you, look at the shelves upon shelves of books – for years, the vessels of all knowledge. We’re part of the new world now, but books persist. Cheap biographies, pulp fiction; glossy covers hiding inadequate sentiments. Walk in and you’re surrounded by this shit – to every side a reminder that we don’t want stimulation anymore, we want sedation. Fight your way through the celebrity memoirs, pornographic cook books, and cheap thrills that satisfy most and you get to the second wave of vomit-inducing product: offerings for the inspired and arty. Matte poetry books, classics, the finest culture can provide packaged and wedged into trendy coverings, kidding you that you’re buying a fashion accessory, not a book. But hey, if you can stomach a trip further into the shop, you hit on the meatier stuff – history, science, economics – provided they can stick ‘pop.’ in front of it, they’ll stock it. Pop. psychology, pop. art, pop. life. It’s the new world – we don’t want serious anymore, we want nuggets of almost-useful information. Books are the past, they’re on the out. Information is digital now; bookshops, they’re somewhere between gallery and museum.

Was happiness (which was perhaps achieved not by getting what you wanted, but rather, by obtaining what you didn’t know you wished for until it was in hand) a hologram that would continually change appearance with the slightest shift of perspective? Or maybe happiness by definition was a temporary state of being recognizable only in hindsight. It was impossible to catch what always managed to be overrun and end up in the rear view mirror.

Was she happy? She thought – yes, reasonably so. Then again, what was happiness but the vast terrain between ecstasy and agony? Was this too small an ambition?

We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear.

We are all of the same substance, the same life. Though there are many differences between us, those are merely the shadows that delineate our boundaries. Our light is the same.

We are a team A beautiful dream Like stones in a stream A literary realm Inspiring everybody to dream!

We can’t handle absence anymore, anything is better than the blankness; the quiet of nothingness. People fight to put images of love and hate – both equally nauseating – between themselves and the blank space that surrounds us. It’s the only escape, and yet we feel the pressure of the blankness pressing in against us, forcing the violent display ever closer, forcing us to demand images brighter, more graphic until they scorch our senses badly enough that we no longer feel the void and the images become our reality. But it’s ok. Most people don’t need to fear absence anymore – we’re blinded, permanently. There’s no need to seek out the light show that protects us either; inoculation precedes the sickness now. Sedation isn’t an option, it’s a shared reality. Most people don’t see the beauty of the system, how perfect our salvation is.

What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born.

We made powwows because we needed a place to be together. Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum.

What did I think? Right then I was thinking about my father, specifically his habit of treating everyone with courtesy and consideration, of how he used to stop on lower Division Street and converse genially with old black men from the Hill whom he knew from his early days as a route man. His kindness and interest weren't feigned, nor did they derive, I'm convinced, from any perceived send of duty. His behavior was merely an extension of who he was. But here's the thing about my father that I've come to understand only reluctantly and very recently. If he wasn't the cause of what ailed his fellow man, neither was he the solution. He believed in "Do unto Others." It was a good, indeed golden, rule to by and it never occurred to him that perhaps it wasn't enough. "You ain't gotta love people," I remember him proclaiming to the Elite Coffee Club guys at Ikey's back in the early days. Confused by mean-spirited behavior, he was forever explaining how little it cost to be polite, to be nice to people. Make them feel good then they're down because maybe tomorrow you'll be down. Such a small thing. Love, he seemed to understand, was a very big thing indeed, its cost enormous and maybe more than you could afford if you were spendthrift. Nobody expects that of you, asny more than they expected you to hand out hundred-dollar bills on the street corner. And I remember my mother's response when he repeated over dinner what he'd told the men at the store. "Really, Lou? Isn't that exactly what we're supposed to do? Love people? Isn't that what the Bible says?

We lie on the blanket, our bare bodies basking in the sun like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Only our apples were bitten a long time ago, and we ate them too.

We're hungry but we're together and we're at home and everything is sweeter than dessert.

When a Wanderess has been caged, or perched with her wings clipped, She lives like a Stoic, She lives most heroic, smiling with ruby, moistened lips once her cup of Death is welcome sipped.

What is more precious: a thousand answers derived from one question? Or, one answer…from a thousand questions?

Whenever I’d get howlin’ over something, he’d grab my ass up from wherever I was and head straight for the john. Momma said my head would get banged up along the way, but she said it was probably bein’ dunked under water that made me stupid.

When I was eight years old, I was abducted from a fast food restaurant by a man who took me, in all likelihood, because of a small splotch of mayonnaise on his hamburger. And so I believe in neither free will nor predetermination. I believe in condiments.

Whether we are men dreaming we are butterflies or butterflies dreaming we are men, the one truth is that all life is an illusion. We are all wandering shades.

When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry and scatter like birds escaping a burning sky. They flee their own wretched land so their hunger may be pacified in foreign lands, their tears wiped away in strange lands, the wounds of their despair bandaged in faraway lands, their blistered prayers muttered in the darkness of queer lands.

While he sweated out a story she bled put a poem.

When no possessions keep us, when no countries contain us, and no time detains us, man becomes a heroic wanderer, and woman, a wanderess.

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!

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.

Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn’t as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social media. So if you were found face down on the floor – people did do that quite a bit; usually men, but not always – or fell through plate glass windows or got into scrapes, it became a rumour, and rumours are hard to pin down.

Write or perish in the banality of mediocrity!

You don't have to VENERATE Hercule Poirot, Ms. Christie, but he didn't deserve to be VILIFIED , either!

A girl without braids is like a city without bridges.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 smile is just the contortion of a face

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!

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.

Bearing witness from the sides of the room, ten or more lepers shouted at the bizarre scene, “Diable! Diable!” And then chants of some sort, or prayers, followed by more shouts of “Diable!” They were hurling these words at Moreau like stones.

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!

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.