c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
But whatever the exact psychology of the process {receiving recognition or literary success}, the present has a way of contaminating the past. And the writing will change accordingly. Turmoil and dilemma once experienced with a certain desperation may be seen more complacently as the writer reflects that through expressing them he has realized his inevitable and well-deserved triumph. The lean years of patient toil when no one paid attention may even begin to seem preferable to the present. The very thing you created in the heat of fierce concentration has destroyed the circumstances that made it possible. The writer is devoured along with his books.
— Tim Parks
Anything that keeps old words in circulation is to be treasured, the French revolution be damned.
— Joseph Bottum
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture.
— G.K. Chesterton
It was his wedding day, and then it was any day; it was nothing, and then it was forever.
— Tim Farrington
A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.
— Munia Khan
InsomniaI wonderIf those talks matterFew done in the clarity of dayOr the manyDone at 3 a.m. in the morning
— Irum Zahra, Psychaotic: See The World In Red And Black
LatelyI’ve been dreaming about youAbout usSharing our secretsTalking, even if we arguedKept talking, till we sleptMaybe I woke upOn the wrong side of bedMaybe I thought about youJust a little too much
— Irum Zahra, Psychaotic: See The World In Red And Black
You see the world in colors,I see in Black and Red.
— Irum Zahra, Psychaotic: See The World In Red And Black
I grow weary of the loveThat lasts for a nightWhen it should be thereThe next sunrise
— Irum Zahra, Psychaotic: See The World In Red And Black
The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them. We need readers. More readers. Fewer writers.
— Robert Galbraith
I am fully conscious that, not being a literary man , certain presumptuous persons will think that they may reasonably blame me; alleging that I am not a man of letters. Foolish folks! do they not know that I might retort as Marius did to the Roman Patricians by saying: That they, who deck themselves out in the labours of others will not allow me my own. They will say that I, having no literary skill, cannot properly express that which I desire to treat of, but they do not know that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words; and experience has been the mistress of those who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will cite her in all cases.
— Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Notebooks
When my words are concealedWith lies and disguises, truth and beyondInsecurities in the veil of trustBetrayal in bounds of liesIt’s just the charm of words darlingGiving the illusion of happiness inside misery
— Irum Zahra, Psychaotic: See The World In Red And Black
Books had taught me new ideas and had shown me ways of life that I would not have known about otherwise, and they offered a refuge when, like now, real life seemed too hard.
— Peg Kehret, Runaway Twin
Imagine that the genome is a book.There are twenty-three chapters, called CHROMOSOMES.Each chapter contains several thousand stories, called GENES.Each story is made up of paragraphs, called EXTONS, which are interrupted by advertisements called INTRONS.Each paragraph is made up of words, called CODONS.Each word is written in letters called BASES.
— Matt Ridley, Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
I think genre rules should be porous, if not nonexistent.
— Kazuo Ishiguro
Of course, that’s one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We’re still waiting for the results.
— Charles Finch
For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints.
— James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value. Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of a translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that which makes it an object of beauty. The translation makes it into something it was not.
— Neil Postman
(Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
everything that is scatteredcomes together in wordseverything that is lostcomes back in poetry.
— Sanober  Khan
Now we’re guests in a faraway land nearly 40 years on. No trees, no cool breeze, no best friends. Only endless days spent in sending SMSs...
— Nabeel Philip Mohan, No Return Address: A collection of poems
You are...the embodimentof immediate good karma.The equalizer between bottomfeeders and the sanctimoniouscogs in the system.
— G.A.P. Gutierrez, No Return Address: A collection of poems
[Y]ou, one day, will knock lips with Turkish-coffee-clad veils whose beds our kin must tuck in misty-eyed.
— Armineonila M., No Return Address: A collection of poems
Bob, I am grateful for yourThree letter name.It's another reminder of homeOf a world predictableOf a life I had.
— Wilfred Waters, No Return Address: A collection of poems
You stand for what is right-for the patient and the staff.Pressures of work may down you,maybe bent but not broken.
— Mujel Hasan, No Return Address: A collection of poems
Haris...as a naive migrantwho just moved here,relying on you tapered worries.
— Tammy Sulit, No Return Address: A collection of poems
Even the new things thatI less than know,I keep trying, did againuntil perfect.
— Alliah "Lenzkie" Tabaya, No Return Address: A collection of poems
Growing up, I loved the tale of Peter Rabbit and also books on Pippi Longstocking. Pippi was a girl who had so much fun and was very daring. My sons loved all the Dr. Seuss books
— Soraya Diase Coffelt
The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one's bidding.
— Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English
Science may explain how humans came into being, but it has no answer to the slippery question of how humans should live. Only literature makes it possible to pose such questions in the first place. And if there is no answer, only literature can point to the impossibility of ever finding one.
— Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English
I never thought I'd fall madly in love with literature.
— Wency June Libot
Her works are said to be too far from reality to be considered real literature. “Why doesn’t she write about life?” the people of Rabbit Back ask.
— Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, The Rabbit Back Literature Society
The great writings interact with one another. They cannot be read in isolation..
— Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth
There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.
— Harold Bloom
Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out …
— Ben Marcus
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.
— Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Valuing a writer only for their diversity, but not their humanity or talent – that’s tokenism.
— Sunili Govinnage
Perhaps somebody has alredy written it. But I want to write a story from the end till the very beginning.
— Alexander Zalan, Pavilion of Thoughts
Personally I know only one person who wrote about utopia. Afterwards he was executed. I suppose it's not my genre.
— Alexander Zalan, Pavilion of Thoughts
This view of literature as an aesthetic object that could make us ‘better people’ is linked to a certain idea of the subject, to what theorists have come to call ‘the liberal subject’, the individual defined not by a social situation and interests but by an individual subjectivity (rationality and morality) conceived as essentially free of social determinants.
— Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction
Getting my legal situation fixed takes a bit longer than we all thought: twelve years to be exact. Not a big deal. Only most of my life.
— Patricio Maya
But it seems to me inevitable that any person who gives thoughtful and imaginative attention to literature must be awakened in his sensibilities, enlarged in his sympathies, sharpened in his critical faculties.
— Denham Sutcliffe, What Shall We Defend?: Essays And Addresses
People are always saying these things about how there's no need to read literature anymore-that it won't help the world. Everyone should apparently learn to speak Mandarin, and learn how to write code for computers. More young people should go into STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and math. And that all sounds to be true and reasonable. But you can't say that what you learn in English class doesn't matter. That great writing doesn't make a difference. I'm different. It's hard to put into words, but it's true. Words matter.
— Meg Wolitzer
Burnout at its deepest level is not the result of some train wreck of examinations, long call shifts, or poor clinical evaluations. It is the sum total of hundreds and thousands of tiny betrayals of purpose, each one so minute that it hardly attracts notice. When a great ship steams across the ocean, even tiny ripples can accumulate over time, precipitating a dramatic shift in course. There are many Tertius Lydgates, male and female, inhabiting the lecture halls, laboratories, and clinics of today’s medical schools. Like latter-day Lydgates, many of them eventually find themselves expressing amazement and disgust at how far they have veered from their primary purpose.
— Richard Gunderman
Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.
— Greil Marcus
Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.
— Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs
They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship's wake.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper
They filed out in descending order by altitudes, the father first, out through the sunlit doors in a sextet of calico isotropes and into the street, the elder smiling, along through the crowds and down the road toward the river still single file and with deadpan decorum leaving behind a congregation mute and astounded.
— Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
When the owner of the pig arrived he found a scrawny and bloodcovered white boychild standing on what was left of his property sawing at it with a knife and hauling on the skin and cursing. The dirty half flayed pig looked like something recovered from a shallow grave.
— Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
Why would a book in which hardly anything happened for most of the time eat at me so much? It was the weirdest thing
— Cynthia Kadohata, The Thing About Luck
To my fellow writers' I say, 'Write. Build an imaginary world like nobody's watching.
— Terry A. O'Neal
I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white man were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book.
— Richard Wright, Black Boy
Don't you think our society is designed to kill in that way? Of course, you've surely heard about those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil which attack the swimmer by the thousands, eat him up in a few moments in quick little mouthfuls and leave only a perfectly clean skeleton behind? So, that's the way they're constituted. 'Do you want a clean life, like everyone else?' Of course the answer is yes. How could you not? 'Fine. We'll clean you up. Here's a job, here's a family, here's some organized leisure.' And the little teeth bite into the flesh, right down to the bone. But i'm being unfair. I shouldn't have said, 'the way they're constituted', because after all, it's our way, too: it's a case of who strips whom.
— Albert Camus
His feet went banging down some stairs. He closed his eyes. They went through cinders and dirt, his heels gathering small windrows of trash. A dim world receded above his upturned toes, shapes of skewed shacks erupted bluely in the niggard lamplight. The rusting carcass of an automobile passed slowly on his right. Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan ink wash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea. He lay with his head on the moldy upholstery of an old car seat among packingcrates and broken shoes and suncrazed rubber toys in the dark. Something warm was running on his chest. He put up a hand. I am bleeding. Unto my death.
— Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs.
— Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
The popular culture gives us books that offer entertainment but no ideas. High culture gives us books that offer ideas but no entertainment. The best books manage to do both.
— Gene Edward Veith Jr., Reading Between the Lines
Harrogate saw them going along Blount Avenue Sunday morning. They wore outfits all cut from the same bolt of cloth and in the church pew standing six across they looked like a strip of gaudy wallpaper cut into those linked dolls madfolk pass their time in fashioning.
— Cormac McCarthy
The danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living (is) you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you're "decoding
— Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books
It symbolizes a spear, and in this sorry world the symbol is the thing.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
(Emerson's) aphorisms tend to be chicken soup for the academic soul or gobledygook of a man who prefers the sounds of words to their meanings.
— Micah Mattix
I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.
— Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books
The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.
— Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books
The committees scour the bookstores, printing and publishing houses, paying particular attention to secondhand bookstores. There, they requisition countless copies of 'Incautious Maidens' or 'Flames at the Metropole.' So that those who prefer the false view of the world presented in cheap novels will never find refuge again.
— Mariusz Szczygieł, Gottland
Luckily, my job demands constant reading, otherwise I'd have to figure out some other excuse.
— Maureen Corrigan
My own mother, who's always dazzled by my faculty and answering questions in the literature a category on Jeopardy whenever we watch it together, keeps urging me to try to get on the show to make all those years spent reading finally pay off. Leave me alone I'm reading
— Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books
Through books I discovered everything to be loved, explored, visited, communed with. I was enriched and given all the blueprints to a marvelous life, I was consoled in adversity, I was prepared for both joys and sorrows, I acquired one of the most precious sources of strength of all: an understanding of human beings, insight into their motivations.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 7: 1966-1974
Dakin: The more you read, though, the more you'll see that literature is actually about losers.Scripps: No.Dakin: It's consolation. All literature is consolation.
— Alan Bennett, The History Boys
. . . Absurdism was really just realism seen from close to the bottom.
— George Saunders
Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder.
— Harold Bloom
The only authentic literature of the modern era is the owner’s manual.
— David Cronenberg, Consumed
I wished I hadn’t majored in women filling their pockets with stones and sticking their heads into ovens. Maybe tomorrow the pinhole would widen and I would want to be a marine biologist.
— Kat  Clark
I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life.
— Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future
I wonder whether, perhaps without realizing it, we seek out the books we need to read. Or whether books themselves, which are intelligent entities, detect their readers and catch their eye. In the end, every book is the I Ching. You pick it up, open it, and there it is, there you are.
— Andrés Neuman
If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.
— Cynthia Ozick
For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann.
— Vladimir Nabokov
To become a 'good reader' one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure. One does not set out to read a book a day (there is no necessary pleasure in that) but may spend two or three years on one book [. . .], read only portions of another, devour a third at a single sitting.
— Michael       Schmidt, The Novel: A Biography
They began to come upon chains and packsaddles, singletrees, dead mules, wagons. Saddletrees eaten bare of their rawhide coverings and weathered white as bone, a light chamfering of miceteeth along the edges of the wood. They rode through a region where iron will not rust nor tin tarnish. The ribbed frames of dead cattle under their patches of dried hide lay like the ruins of primitive boats upturned upon that shoreless void and they passed lurid and austere the black and desiccated shapes of horses and mules that travelers had stood afoot.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Every day I would run to the library to get new books. Reading was a passion: I wanted to understand life. I read Dostoevsky and Brehm, Jules Verne and Turgenev, Dickens and the Zhivopisnoye Obozreniye; and the more I read, th emore I doubted everything. Lies surrounded me on all sides; one moment I wanted to run off to the Indian jungle, the next to throw a bomb at the governor-general's house on Tverskaya, the next to hang myself.
— Ilya Ehrenburg, People, Years and Life
Hundreds of thousands of people live in my library. Some are real, others are fictional. The real ones are the so-called imaginary characters in works of literature, the fictional ones are their authors. We know everything about the former, or at least as much as we are meant to know, everything that is written about a given character in a novel, a story or a poem in which she or he figures...The rest doesn't matter. Nothing is hidden from us. For us, a novel's characters are real. (p. 80
— Jacques Bonnet, Phantoms on the Bookshelves
Get thee to the novel! - the novel, that word-woven submarine, piloted by intimation and intuition, that will dive you to the deeps of the heart's maelstrom.
— Cynthia Ozick, The Din in the Head
Who can say they saw a whole play or read a whole book? Each has their own experience, their own play, their own book
— Johnny Rich, The Human Script
You can't memorize poetry and stay a fake. Sooner or later, you start to understand what these poets are saying, and it makes you feel life has something quite special, with certain layers of meaning to it.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
First time my master’s in English literature ever proved useful.
— Anne Rice, The Wolf Gift
There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.
— Ben Lerner, 10:04
It often is better to ask an ancient Hebrew goatherd, instead of a so-called expert like myself, about the meaning of a particular, biblical story.
— Richard Gist
As Borges himself showed us in so many stories — "The Aleph", "The Garden of Forking Paths", "The Gift", "Blue Tigers", "Shakespeare's Memory" — a blessing is always a mixed blessing.As Borges noted sadly, he inherited a library, and blindness; we who study Borges inherit great sight, yet the rest of the library somehow fades.(pg 303, "What I Lost When I Translated Jorge Luis Borges")
— Andrew Hurley
Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs
— Cormac McCarthy
There seemed no reason why she shouldn't try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same - you couldn't just soak it up and then squeeze it out again.
— David Nicholls, One Day
A big lemoncolored cat watched him from the top of a woodstove. He turned his head to see it better and it elongated itself like hot taffy down the side of the stove and vanished headfirst in the earth without a sound.
— Cormac McCarthy
This ferry was taken over by the Yumas and operated for them by a man named Callaghan, but within days it was burned and Callaghan's headless body floated anonymously downriver, a vulture standing between the shoulderblades in clerical black, silent rider to the sea.
— Cormac McCarthy
It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.
— David Foster Wallace
Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations—that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls.
— Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it.
— Marcel Proust, Time Regained
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.
— Oscar Wilde
writing home"here in the wilderness of australiawriting home becomes easyin spite of the spreading wild firesthere is less heat, more certainty.writing home, writing thisi think of those without real homes–our city, people say, provides houseswhich do not, often, bring one home.
— Kirpal Singh, The Best of Kirpal Singh
It seemed as if the mountains, wave after wave of them, were like the sea, going outward forever into distance, till, far away, they became engulfed in clouds, and joined—mountain and sky in one. Standing there on top, facing the enormity of the world, I thought of myself as a man. How boundlessly small we are…
— Tan Kok Seng, Man of Malaysia
...the pleasures of literary fiction are the pleasures of orientation
—  the pleasures of literature are the pleasures of bewilderment.
Yet when books have been read and reread, it boils down to the horse, his human companion, and what goes on between them.
— Walter Farley
But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.
— Tim Parks
It’s a powerful moment, when you discover a vocabulary exists for something you’d thought incommunicably unique. Personally, I felt it reading Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim.” I have friends who’ve found themselves described in everything from science fiction to detective novels. This self-recognition through others is not simply a by-product of art — it’s the whole point.
— Phil Klay
A classic is a book that has never finished what it wants to say.
— Italo Calvino
Literature itself is a species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life.
— Marcel Theroux, Strange Bodies
It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator — a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
— Mary Ruefle
I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I'm not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can life inside Alice Munro's skin. But I can't relate to my own mother. My body is full of sentences and moments, my heart resplendent with lovely turns of phrases, but neither is able to be touched by another.
— Rabih Alameddine
Books have power to bring you glory or doom, it all depends on perception.
— Nikita Dudani
If people cannot be flawed in fiction there's no place left for us to be human.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
That such a slave as this should wear a sword,Who wears no honesty. Such smiling rogues as these,Like rats, oft bite the holy cords atwainWhich are too intrinse t' unloose; smooth every passionThat in the natures of their lords rebel,Being oil to the fire, snow to the colder moods,Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaksWith every gale and vary of their mastersKnowing naught, like dogs, but following.
— William Shakespeare, King Lear
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
— Ezra Pound
What makes Geoffrey Chaucer such compelling reading is his creation of a riveting conversation between the ideal and the everyday.
— John Mark Reynolds
It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people...
— Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committ
— Christopher Hitchens, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports
She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman's beauty is a treasure beyond price.
— Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Evidently, I'd suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.
— Tom Robbins, Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart.
— Salman Rushdie
People are never satisfied. If they have a little, they want more. If they have a lot, they want still more. Once they have more, they wish they could be happy with little, but are incapable of making the slightest effort in that direction.
I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.
— Richard Flanagan
I am no longer a writer. Just an emotion. An emotion that is unable to stay within its own body, and is therefore, trying to make its way into yours.
— Zaeema J. Hussain, The Sky Is Purple
But just understand the difference between a man like Reardon and a man like me. He is the old type of unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won't make concessions, or rather, he can't make them; he can't supply the market. I--well, you may say that at present, I do nothing; but that's a great mistake, I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising. He knows perfectly all the possible sources of income. Whatever he has to sell, he'll get payment for it from all sorts of various quarters; none of your unpractical selling for a lump sum to a middleman who will make six distinct profits.
— George Gissing, New Grub Street
Writing is about taking everyday observations, things which people see almost every day of their lives, and yet bringing it to their attention for the very first time.
— Jamie L. Harding
When it comes to literature, we are all groping in the dark, even the writer. Especially the writer. And that is a good thing--maybe one of the best things about literature. It's always an adventure of some kind.
— Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books
Literature sustains life because it captures death in its forward march. Clickety-clickety-clack, the wheels go round and round ...
— Chris Campanioni, In Conversation
This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being.
— Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus
Literature decays only as men become more and more corrupt.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The mythic voice rising from literature and art allows us to be humane. We are not humane because of political power, or education, or even religion. We are humane because we recognize the humanity of others. The writer and the artist appeal to that humanity. For that reason, literature and art are the bones of civilization.
— Jack Cady
My heart was full and uplifted; it seemed that in my soul the question arose whether such things as Art, literature, science encompassed and completed life or whether there was still something in the distance which encompassed it even more completely and filled it with a far greater happiness.
— Adalbert Stifter, Indian Summer
People are never satisfied. If they have a little, they want more. If they have a lot, they want still more. Once they have more, they wish they could be happy with little, but are incapableof making the slightes effort in that direction.
Literature is called adabiyat in Islam precisely because it is seen as the keeper of a civilization and the collector of teachings and statements that educate the self and society with adab such that both are elevated to the rank of the cultured man (insan adabi) and society.
— Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud, Islamization of Contemporary Knowledge and the Role of the University in the Context of De-Westernization and Decolonization
So, fuck ’em, we say. Fuck the mundane of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We’re GENRE FICTION and proud of it, proud to wear that brand painted on the backs of our biker’s jackets.
— Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions
In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys — literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author — the joys and difficulties of creation. We did not talk around books, about books; we went to the center of this or that masterpiece, to the live heart of the matter.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature
Monsters are real and ghosts are real too they live inside us and sometimes they win.
— Stephen King
This person has hoped and dreamed and now it is really happening and this person can hardly believe it. But believing is not an issue here, the time for faith and fantasy is over, it is really really happening. It involves stepping forward and bowing. Possibly there is some kneeling, such as when one is knighted. One is almost never knighted. But this person may kneel and receive a tap on each shoulder with a sword. Or, more likely, this person will be in a car or a store or under a vinyl canopy when it happens. Or online or on the phone. It could be an e-mail re: your knighthood. Or a long, laughing, rambling phone message in which every person this person has ever known is talking on a speakerphone and they are all saying, You have passed the test, it was all just a test, we were only kidding, real life is so much better than that.
— Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You
Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)
— Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature
There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a character in a work of fiction you can allow a reader to leap over the wall of self and to allow him to imagine himself not only somewhere else but someone else in a way that television and movies, in a way that no other form can do. I think people are essentially lonely and alone and frightened of being alone.
— David Foster Wallace
And with distance in time it is the same as with distance in place. The imagination has its atmosphere and its sunlight as well as the earth has; only its mists are even more gorgeous and delicate, its aerial perspectives are even more wide and profound. It also transifgures and beautifies things in far more various ways. For the imagination is all senses in one; it is sight, it is smell, it is hearing; it is memory, regret, and passion. Everything goes to nourish it, from first love to literature - literature, which, for cultivated people, is the imagination's gastric juice.
— William Hurrell Mallock, In An Enchanted Island: Or A Winter's Retreat In Cyprus
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
— Barbara W. Tuchman
The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life & Opinions
There is no book so bad it does not contain something good.
— Pliny
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read
— Oscar Wilde
Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own.
— James W. Sire, How to Read Slowly
The word 'NO' is the best motivation there is for the storyteller in you.
— A.K. Kuykendall
It is hieroglyphic that will last, not stone heads. The future belongs to the word, not the image.(The mason Mutsose, in Achet-Aten).
— Steven William Lawrie, Achet-Aten, or 1:1.618
I am very careful about who I choose to build memories with. Some of them might last a lifetime.
— Angélica Calheiros
{...} It is hieroglyphic that will last, not stone heads. The future belongs to the word, not the image.(The mason Mutsose, in Achet-Aten).
— Steven William Lawrie, Achet-Aten, or 1:1.618
When I'm writing I don't want anyone else in the room - including myself.
— Jonathan Franzen
If arts and music, precious gifts in themselves, were akin to memory, literature was the self-knowing of the species; the human mind accumulated, a manifest of wisdom and knowledge, self-doubt and awareness, folly and foible, all transmitted through the generations. Books amplified the light of mind, reinforced the soul.
— Mark Cantrell, Silas Morlock
Literature, I have always thought, is in most places and companies a singularly dull and uninteresting thing to talk about, but one may, as a rule, hate literary conversation, and yet at the right moment, with all its powers of feeling, the mind in silence may feel what it owes to literature.
— William Hurrell Mallock, In an Enchanted Island Or A Winter's Retreat In Cyprus
I don't think that, when future generations look at the apartheid struggle, they will see it as quite the momentous literary cauldron that recent history has suggested. In fact, as well as recording the struggle for human rights, the literary account, which Gordimer has kept so faithfully and truthfully, may be seen as something of a storm in a teacup. Of course it was true that South Africa preserved in much-condensed form all the nasty prejudices and cruelties of an earlier age, and so it was of particular interest to the liberal West. How, it wondered, could something so obscenely and obviously wrong persist? But this was also obvious to every educated white person in South Africa. Certainly, in my family there were never any misconceptions about the nakedly discriminatory nature of Nationalist rule from 1948 to 1994. Those of us who left had many motives, but one of them was a reluctance to spend our lives attacking the indefensible, particularly in Marxist terms. The point I am making, and have been making for a few years, is that white South African writing rode a wave, whether consciously or not. The big issues that it tackled were in fact long since resolved: The South African Afrikaner government was a blind appendix loosely attached to the western digestive system.
— Justin Cartwright
A boy trying out a man's language.
— Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child
Reagan's failure to become a truly great movie star has been ascribed to project menace, sexuality, or even moral ambiguity.
— Scott Farris, Kennedy and Reagan: Why Their Legacies Endure
Is Shimmer a floor wax or a dessert topping? Is an electron a wave or a particle? Slipstream tells us that the answer is yes.
— John Kessel, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology
If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own.
— Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國
But the thing about Literature is, well, basically it encapsulates all the disciplines - it's history, philosophy, politics, sexual politics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, science. Literature is mankind's organised response to the world around him, or her.
— David Nicholls, Starter for Ten
The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much ‘relevance’. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic.
— Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words
Stories don’t teach us to be good; it isn’t as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be good, or to be bad. They show us people like ourselves doing right things and wrong things, acting bravely or acting meanly, being cruel or being kind, and they leave it up to our own powers of empathy and imagination to make the connection with our own lives. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. It isn’t like putting a coin in a machine and getting a chocolate bar; we’re not mechanical, we don’t respond every time in the same way…The moral teaching comes gently, and quietly, and little by little, and weighs nothing at all. We hardly know it’s happening. But in this silent and discreet way, with every book we read and love, with every story that makes its way into our heart, we gradually acquire models of behavior and friends we admire and patterns of decency and kindness to follow.
— Philip Pullman
Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
— Samuel Butler
Tis true what Hemingway says--if we're lucky enough to live our dreams in youth, as Ernest Hemingway did in 1920's Paris and I did with the Beat poets, then youth's dreams become a moveable feast you take wherever you go--youthful love remains the repast plentiful; exquisite, substantive and good. You can live on happy memories. Eat of them forever.
— Alison Winfield Burns, Ivy League Bohemians (A Girl Among Boys): Bliss Book of Columbia University's Pariah Artists
YOUR BOREDOM IS YOUR PROBLEM," said Owen Meany. "IT'S YOUR LACK OF IMAGINATION THAT BORES YOU. HARDY HAS THE WORLD FIGURED OUT. TESS IS DOOMED. FATE HAS IT IN FOR HER. SHE'S A VICTIM; IF YOU'RE A VICTIM, THE WORLD WILL USE YOU. WHY SHOULD SOMEONE WHO'S GOT SUCH A WORKED-OUT WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD BORE YOU? WHY SHOULDN'T YOU BE INTERESTED IN SOMEONE WHO'S WORKED OUT A WAY TO SEE THE WORLD? THAT'S WHAT MAKES WRITERS INTERESTING!
— John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
Everyone in this tale has a rock-solid hamartia: hers, that she is so sick; yours, that you are so well. Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
— Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination
Clarissa had a theory in those days - they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people.
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
The darkest of men carry the brightest of lights
— Joe Putignano, Acrobaddict
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.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions
Modern literature is a north-east wind--a blight of the human soul. I take credit to myself for having helped to make it so. The way to produce fine fruit is to blight the flower. You call this a paradox. Marry, so be it.
— Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey
If we go on in this way, we shall have a new art of poetry, of which one of the first rules will be: To remember to forget that there are any such things as sunshine and music in the world.
— Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read.
— Henry David Thoreau
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.
— Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
The re-evaluation and rediscovery of minority art (including the cultural minority of women) is often conceived as a matter of remedying injustice and exclusiveness through doing justice to individual artists by allowing their work into the canon, which will thereby be more complete, but fundamentally unchanged.
— Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing
Stories don’t teach us to be good; it isn’t as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be good, or to be bad. They show us people like ourselves doing right things and wrong things, acting bravely or acting meanly, being cruel or being kind, and they leave it up to our own powers of empathy and imagination to make the connection with our own lives. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. It isn’t like putting a coin in a machine and getting a chocolate bar; we’re not mechanical, we don’t respond every time in the same way…The moral teaching comes gently, and quietly, and little by little, and weighs nothing at all. We hardly know it’s happening. But in this silent and discreet way, with every book we read and love, with every story that makes its way into our heart, we gradually acquire models of behaviour and friends we admire and patterns of decency and kindness to follow.
— Philip Pullman
The literature hardly helps. You remember it only when you are well, healthy, and in a positive state of mind. And you tend to blame your circumstances and people around you for the outcome of the follies you commit.
— Girdhar Joshi, Some Mistakes Have No Pardon
Perhaps forgiveness wasn’t a singular event, but a progression, or better, a dance that took some figuring before you could perform the steps.
— Bonnie Grove, Talking to the Dead
Thus like a Captive in an Isle confin'd,Man walks at large, a Pris'ner of the Mind
— John Dryden, Four Plays by Dryden: The Conquest of Granada parts 1 and 2, Marriage-a-la-Mode, and The Assignation