Literature Quotes

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of l...

First time my master’s in English literature ever proved useful.

In literary history generation follows generation in a rage.

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.

If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," I...

Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class Fra...

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

Oh? And what's so stinking about it?.

Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language

Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.

One hears about life all the time from different people with very different narrative gifts.

Speaking about time’s relentless passage, Powell’s narrator compares certain stages of experience to...

Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the n...

Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the n...

Medicine is my lawful wife. Literature is my mistress.

Except for two or three older writers, all modern literature seems to me not literature but some sor...

I'm not saying that French books are talented, and intelligent, and noble. They don't satisfy me eit...

O, I do read Indian novels sometimes. But you know, Ms Rupinder, what we Indians want in literature,...

We knock upon silence for an answering music.

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instrumentsproducing a confused agree...

There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient ...

I think that I had better go, Holmes.""Not a bit, doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my B...

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own. ...

I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door ...

Happiness, said De Quincey, on his discovery of the paradise that he thought he had found in opium, ...

It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful.

Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which r...

A good novel is an indivisible sum: every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve...

The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested est...

A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated—as t...

In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of ea...

I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in ...

Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. It is only throug...

The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home." Most great works of the imagi...

Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you ...

A novel works it's magic by putting a reader inside another person's life. The pace is as slow as li...

Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully ...

Different authors have different points of view. You can't just say, 'I believe in the Bible.

[P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bibl...

Young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive...

I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything roma...

Critical interventions around race did not destroy the women's movement; it became stronger . . . It...

If improving conditions in the workplace for women had been a central agenda for feminist movement i...

Sir, I shall not defeat you - I shall transcend you.

The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more l...

I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along ...

But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing...

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ...

If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something trau...

If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something trau...

Homicide is not a sin. It is sometimes a necessary violence on resistant and ossified forms of exist...

One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Ha...

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies t...

What may be myth in one world may always be fact in some other.

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.

The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good lit...

The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes ar...

In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out...

The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes hims...

You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You c...

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know ...

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on whic...

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on whic...

Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of lite...

Mention the gothic, and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinis...

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escap...

He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the ...

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose sme...

Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and ...

Without literature, life is hell.

One must always be careful of books,' said Tessa, 'and what is inside them, for words have the power...

Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: "You can't deceive me. I know ...

The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the pla...

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: "You can't deceive me. I know ...

Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we...

If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.

I walked around the library looking for books. I pulled them off the shelves, one by one. But they w...

There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed lov...

It is the custom on the stage in all good, murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic...

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.

He gave it its present name, and lived here shut up: day and night poring over the wicked heaps of p...

My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for...

To have all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my entertainment, instead...

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without ...

Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself...

Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its ...

Her book has perhaps been a good one; it has refreshed, refilled, rewarmed her heart; it has set her...

Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.

A book did not qualify as literature unless it had polysyllabic words and incomprehensible passages.

I just can't get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a boo...

Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with w...

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This str...

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.