Literature Quotes - Page 40

Devil and God – two sides of the same face.

Paradoxically, however, a story ceases to be like life on its last page. Life goes on, but the story does not. Its characters have no vitality outside the first page and after the last is only good as the next reader's.

When this book is mould,And a book of manyWaiting to be soldFor a casual penny,In a little open case,In a street unclean and cluttered,Where a heavy mud is spatteredFrom the passing drays,Stranger, pause and look;From the dust of agesLift this little book,Turn the tattered pages,Read me, do not let me die!Search the fading letters, findingSteadfast in the broken bindingAll that once was I!

Hold your pen and spare your voice.

Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.

The end of the world can be cozy at times.

He pries me from his chest and drops his hand from the back of my head, tracing my ear, along my jawline. He snatches his fingers a moment before they press into my lip.

A month later the law student leaves you for one of her classmates, tells you that it was great but she has to start being realistic. . . . .Later you see her with said classmate on the Yard. He's even lighter than you but he still looks unquestionably black. He's also like nine feet tall and put together like an anatomy primer. They are walking hand in hand and she looks so very happy that you try to find the space in your heart not to begrudge her.

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.

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

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.

The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake.

To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.

Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air--to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light.

The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on aberration and artifice, the decadents' approach to the language of fiction frequently leans towards the baroque and the obscure.

The longest piece of literature I've read lately was a tattoo on this biker I picked up last night. It said, If you're this close, you've gotta suck it.

Literature wasn’t intended to be about perfect people, it was about flaws, very real and very deep human flaws.

Literature is light.

We need knew knights, but without swords.

Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord? Hamlet: Between who? Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.

Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.

Can you blame me, my dear, for looking on this attachment as a romantic folly inspired by that cursed Shakespeare who will poke his nose where he is not wanted?

God produced great writing, a matter of first importance to a man like Lincoln, ever impressed with the nature of cause and forces.

A good book is an event in my life.

To enjoy and learn from what you read you must understand the meanings of the words a writer uses. You do yourself a grave disservice if you read around words you don’t know, or worse, merely guess at what they mean without bothering to look them up.For me, reading has always been not only a quest for pleasure and enlightenment but also a word-hunting expedition, a lexical safari.

We are so much distracted nowadays. There is so much distractions in the world today call it internet, media, football matches etc. but don't let it consume you.

Wherever there is somebody else, a war is not far away.

This is a woman who didn’t want her viewpoints challenged, nor to see the views of the half of the world that comprises men. Her assumption is that all male authors are sexist and that their books distort the views of women....that’s bigoted and despicable: the form of feminism that sees men as the enemy from the outset, and seeks to reinforce that prejudice by reading only books that keep her in her safe space.....The future, in both life and books, is men and women together, with a mutual understanding that can come only from learning about each other’s thoughts. [About Caitlin Moran's sexist statement that girls shouldn't read any books written by men.]

Don’t interrupt when your characters take a flight of their own.

Sappho isn't really meant to be read. It's meant to be sung and there were dances for the songs, also. Sappho was a performance artist, and now she exists as a textual project. She was saved by her critics, and by people who wrote of her in letters to each other. As the morning sun lathers the pool through the long windows and stripes the opposite walls in gold, I look at the fragment translations. She's paper, too. A paper poet for a paper boy. People claim to be translating her but they don't, really, they use her to write poems from as they fill in the gaps in the fragments. A duet. She may have meant for these to be solos but they're duets now, though the second singer blends in with the first. The first singer in this case is offstage, like in the old days of stars who couldn't sing, a real singer hidden behind a curtain, which is the velvet drape of history.

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.

I don't want to be a vampire' she told herself. But in her dreams, she kind of did.

A writer gets to live yet another life every time she creates a new story.

Human communication and literature are all made of words; thus, it’s hard to overestimate their unbelievable power.

If what we think of ourselves were true, the planet would overflow with geniuses.

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.

These are my habits and the way I spend my life: studying literature.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

The chaos of their voices registers as a single, overwhelming force cutting off her ability to reason, and all she wants is to get as far away from people as possible.

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course – I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the Midwest to Leechfield, then spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother’s front porch reading Homer (or Ovid or Virgil) and waiting for someone to ask me what I was reading. No one ever did. People asked me what I was drinking, how much I weighed, where I was living, and if I had married yet, but no one gave me a chance to deliver my lecture on Great Literature.

You either see it or you don't

With her it's as if a text was written so that we can identify the characters, the narrator, the setting, the plot, the time of the story, and so on. I don't think it has ever occurred to her that a text is written above all to be read and to arouse emotions in the reader.

All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense and almost frightening tradition; they accept that tradition or they fight against it, it inhabits them, it is their familiar and their succubus. Why write, if everything has, in a way, already been said? Gide observed sardonically that since nobody listened, everything has to be said again, yet a suspicion of guilt and superfluity leads the European intellectual to the most extreme refinements of his trade and tools, the only way to avoid paths too much traveled. Thus the enthusiasm that greets novelties, the uproar when a writer has succeeded in giving substance to a new slice of the invisible; merely recall symbolism, surrealism, the ‘nouveau roman’: finally something truly new that neither Ronsard, nor Stendahl , nor Proust imagined. For a moment we can put aside our guilt; even the epigones begin too believe they are doing something new. Afterwards, slowly, they begin to feel European again and each writer still has his albatross around his neck.

I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.

Life is a rich literature. We are only writing the history of our time.

Energy manipulation took place completely in mind,same way believing in telepathy caused telepathic abilities to grow STRONGER.

Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.

The farther away, the closer the home becomes.

Writing poetry is a state of free float

God is a cloud from which rain fell.

For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born with a talent for which there was at present no objective.

Everything seems impossible And everything seems possible.

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

He did not wholly understand the intricate play of ideas and the complex phrases, but as he read he sensed a strong, who purpose behind the words and he felt that he almost understood.

Books have power to bring you glory or doom, it all depends on perception.

Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying.

Dreams are good at playing with your memory. They love leaving no trace behind and hate to show up once again in the morning.