c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Not all stories end happily nor tragically. Most of them just need to be continued.
— Prex J.D.V. Ybasco
Mrs. Bulstrode's naïve way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask...
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
So things remained until one day, many years later, I happened upon a line in a poem by Heine: “Death is the cooling night.” That childhood memory, lost for so long, suddenly restored itself to my quivering heart, returning freshly washed, in limpid clarity, never again to leave me. 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. Heine put into words the feeling I had as a child when I lay napping in the morgue. And that, I tell myself, is literature.
— Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國
Never try to outgrow the people who were helping you walk, when you could not even walk.
— Akash Lakhotia, World Hypnotized: Making of the Fuhrer
Snowflake’s journey is a metaphor. A metaphor for what, exactly?I have no freaking clue.
— Special Snowflake, My Safe Space
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.
— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
What are the unreal things but the passion that once burned one like a fire? What are the incredible things but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things but the things that one has done oneself?
— Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies
But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?
— Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies
Even if a poem is beautiful and memorable, it’s not like an advertising jingle or propaganda, which attempt to convince and control. Poems seek to confuse, disabuse, enlarge understanding, and make people ask questions and think for themselves.
— Rachel Zucker
What makes up a life
—  events or the recollection of events?How much of recollection is invention?Whose invention?
Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.
— Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies
Progress is not one of those floating comparatives, so beloved of our friends in advertising, we need a context, a perspective. What are we better than? Who are we better than? Examine this statement: Most people are better off. Financially? socially? educationally? medically? spiritually? I dare not ask if you are happy? Are you happy?
— Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies
I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.
— Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies
To write? Because all this is ging to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left we nothing, we would be naked on earth.
— James Slater
Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.
— Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies
And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the observed.
— Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies
Treat your mind like a museum, not a warehouse
— Ignassen Mather, The 30 Day Media Diet
This compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without result was so cruel that one day, noticing a swelling over his stomach, he felt an actual joy in the idea that he had, perhaps, a tumor that would prove fatal, that he need not concern himself with anything further, since it was this malady that was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the not-distant end. If indeed, at his period, it often happened that, though without admitting it even to himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape not so much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of his struggle.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
He had so long since ceased to direct his life toward any ideal goal, and had confined himself to the pursuit of quotidian satisfactions, that he had come to believe, though without ever formally stating his belief even to himself that he would remain all his life in that condition, which only death could alter.
— Marcel Proust, Swanns Way
Say you've just read Faulkner's 'Barn Burning'. Like the son in the story, you've sensed the faults in your father's character. Thinking about them makes you uncomfortable, left alone you'd probably close the book and move on to other thoughts. But instead you are taken in hand by a tall, brooding man with a distinguished limp who involves you and a roomful of other boys in the consideration of what it means to be a son. The loyalty that is your duty and your worth and your problem. The goodness of loyalty and its difficulties and snares, how loyalty might also become betrayal - of the self and the world outside the circle of blood. You've never had this conversation before, not with anyone. And even as its happening you understand that just as your father's troubles with the world - emotional frailty, self-doubt, incomplete honesty - will not lead him to set it on fire, your own loyalty will never be the stuff of tragedy. You will not turn bravely and painfully from your father, as the boy in the story does, but foresake him, without regret. And as you accept that separation, it seems to happen; your father's sad, fleshy face grows vague, and you blink it away and look up to where your teachers leans against his desk, one hand in a coat pocket, the other rubbing his bum knee as he listens desolately to the clever bore behind you saying something about bird imagery.
— Tobias Wolff, Old School
Writing evinces the soul of an active mind and every era produced persons whom devoted their being to exploring the mysteries of life, seeking to discern answers pertaining how to resolve the complexities and paradoxes of life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
I have lived so long within the circle of this book [Tender Is The Night] and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds....it is an absolute fact---so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I think the novel is a wonder....it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality....And as for the sheer writing, it's astonishing. [About The Great Gatsby]
— Maxwell Perkins
The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimensions and intensity of the impression you make a paragraph carry, are most extraordinary.... You once told me you were not a natural writer—my God! You have plainly mastered the craft, of course; but you needed far more than craftsmanship for this. [about The Great Gatsby]
— Maxwell Perkins
Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world.
— Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze
Literature is analysis after the event.
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
According to the scientist, time is interminable and inexhaustible. The artist is more inclined to relate the passage of time as a subject involving the randomness of memory and humankind’s ability to create vivid recollections. Astute artists depict collections of disjointed thought fragments in paintings and literature in order to stir the pot of human consciousness. Art rests upon the correspondence between the impact of external experience and the finiteness of human life. An artist attempts to articulate answers to the mystery of being by rendering a thoughtful interpretation of the world that we occupy and experience through our senses.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Utopia retains throughout its long history the basic form of the narrative of a journey. The traveler in space or time is an explorer who happens upon utopia. He (or, more recently, she) meets its people, usually at first its ordinary people, observes them at work and play, sees their dwellings and their cities... The traveler is, as are we, the more prepared to accept the validity and desirability of the general principles for having seen with his own eyes its effects in the daily life of its inhabitants.
— Krishan Kumar, Utopianism
That's the beauty and the curse of the 'engrafted word'... it all comes down to interpretation.
— Amy   Marie, Reminiscence
The artistic creation of the poet, painter, photographer, and writer is a reflection of the artist’s inner world. The agenda of consciousness that spurs all forms of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but to portray its inward significance to the creator. A great poem, painting, photograph, and written composition fully express what the creator feels, in the deepest sense, about the distinctively depicted image that captured their imagination.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
He loved words, and he would admit that he was playing with them all the time. He was obsessive about the rhythm of the sentence, and would add a word, subtract a word. [about Truman Capote]
— Deborah Kerr
Utopia retains throughout its long history the basic form of the narrative of a journey... First comes the picture of a happy people in a beautiful and well-ordered setting; then comes the lecture on how it all came about, how it works, and, by implication, how it might be made to work in the traveller's own society.
— Krishan Kumar, Utopianism
Every day in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question 'How shall I live?' is not one I can answer on prescription.
— Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies
Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?
— Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
Say a day without the ever.
— William Shakespeare, As You Like It
[Metaphors] replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.
— Amos Tversky
It is not enough for the hand to touch a book and turn its pages. The pages of a book must touch the heart.
— J.E.B. Spredemann
Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Letters
with you, the sense i have lost my place in a bookor simply lost — misplaced the memorywhich isn't in the last place where I looked.a thought that the clouds don't move — that it is wewho thunder past — there it is! an old vacation,a train ride — sense of immobility.as sky and forest scroll past in relation,we are not moved, pretend to love the view,resort at length to scripted conversationby a poet-turned-screenwriter who didn't want this job, career gone grossly wrongand now drafts action film scripts wholly two-dimensional unless you choose to don the 3d glasses that do not stay on —
— Joshua Ip, Making Love with Scrabble Tiles
What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?
— W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore
The core – and perhaps unexpected – thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there are powerful ways in which books organise, and clarify our concerns – and in this sense simplify.
— Alain de Botton
Literature recounts history, explores knowledge, narrates universal themes of human existence, actives human conscience, enhances understanding of human motives, and explicates the nuances of human behavior.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical.
— Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
Yes, I am confusing literature with life. I'm declaring my own ordinary life to be a work of literature.
— Tadeusz Konwicki, A Minor Apocalypse
Tell me of your Willoughbys, Heathcliffs and Wickhams in literature and I will tell you I met them all.
— Shannon L. Alder
Poetry and visions, springing as they do from an ever-present sense of mortality, might easily appear morbid to the sturdycommon sense of a burgher-class in the making.
— Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
O, I do read Indian novels sometimes. But you know, Ms Rupinder, what we Indians want in literature, at least the kind written in English, is not literature at all, but flattery. We want to see ourselves depicted as soulful, sensitive, profound, valorous, wounded, tolerant and funny beings. All that Jhumpa Lahiri stuff. But the truth is, we are absolutely nothing of that kind. What are we, then, Ms Rupinder? We are animals of the jungle, who will eat our neighbour's children in five minutes, and our own in ten. Keep this in mind before you do any business in this country.
— Aravind Adiga, Selection Day
Literature not only illuminated another's experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection
— Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air
I wrote when I did not know life;now that I know life, I have no more to say.
— Oscar Wilde
I was working in silence seeking no appreciation or respect from any one. And it is always the silence from which great literature is born.
— Abhijit Naskar, Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost
The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.
— Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines
The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.
— Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul.
— Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
Fitzgerald has charm. It's a silly word, but it's an exact word for me. I like 'The Great Gatsby' and it's sad, gay nostalgia.
— Truman Capote
Yes, looking through the eyes of literature we may talk about the beauty of sadness! But in the eyes of truth, sadness is just saddening; there is no beauty there, only a touching desperation!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
In literature, the reader standing at the threshold of the end of a book harbors no illusion that the end has not come—he or she can see where it finishes, the abyss the other side of the last chunk of text. Which means that the writer is never in danger of ending too soon—or if he does the reader has been so forewarned. This is the advantage a book has over a film—it is the brain that marshals forward the text and controls the precise moment of conclusion of the book, as the density of the pages thins. A film can end without you if you’ve fallen asleep or, because you can’t wait any longer to use the bathroom, slipped out of the darkness of the theatre salon, and missed it. There will never be a form more perfect than the book, which always moves at your pace, that sits waiting for you exactly where you’ve left it and never goes on without you.
— John M. Keller, Abracadabrantesque
It’s hard to say something about Pushkin to a person who doesn’t know anything about him. Pushkin is a great poet. Napoleon is not as great as Pushkin. Bismarck compared to Pushkin is a nobody. And the Alexanders, First, Second and Third, are just little kids compared to Pushkin. In fact, compared to Pushkin, all people are little kids, except Gogol. Compared to him, Pushkin is a little kid.And so, instead of writing about Pushkin, I would rather write about Gogol.Although, Gogol is so great that not a thing can be written about him, so I'll write about Pushkin after all.Yet, after Gogol, it’s a shame to have to write about Pushkin. But you can’t write anything about Gogol. So I’d rather not write anything about anyone.
— Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.
— Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
If he had stayed in Slovenia, and Slovenia had stayed Communist, Zizek would not have been the nuisance he has since become. Indeed, if there were no greater reason to regret the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the release of Zizek on to the world of Western scholarship would perhaps already be a sufficient one.
— Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left
Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here…think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.
— Alasdair Gray, Lanark
I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.
— Pat Conroy, A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life
I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.
— Pat Conroy, A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life
Love has always been the chief business of my life, the only thing I have thought—no, felt—supremely worth while, and I don’t pretend that this experience was not succeeded by others. But at that time, I was innocent, with the innocence of ignorance, I didn’t know what was happening to me. I was without consciousness, that is to say, more utterly absorbed than was ever possible again. For after that first time there was always part of me standing aside, comparing, analysing, objecting: ‘Is this real? Is this sincere?’ All the world of my predecessors was there before me, taking, as it were, the bread out of my mouth. Was this stab in my heart, this rapture, really mine or had I merely read about it? For every feeling, every vicissitude of my passion, there would spring into my mind a quotation from the poets. Shakespeare or Donne or Heine had the exact phrase for it. Comforting, perhaps, but enraging too. Nothing ever seemed spontaneously my own. As the blood dripped from the wound, there was always part of me to watch with a smile and a sneer: ‘Literature! Mere literature! Nothing to make a fuss about!’ And then I would add, ‘But so Mercutio jested as he died!
— Dorothy Bussy, Olivia
To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet wanted stories, I came to realise, in which they were already imprisoned, not stories in which they appeared along with the storyteller, accomplices in escaping.
— Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
I think the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. When there are many writers all employing the same idiom, all looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individual writer will have to be more than ever careful that he isn't just doing badly what has already been done to completion. The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Slang surely, as it is called, comes of, and breathes of the personal
— John Henry Newman
Everything is still everything.The Poem Remains.
— R.M. Engelhardt (TALON), The Bones of Our Existence, A Journal 2046
Here at last was an Attendant Spirit to liberate us from the spells of Burkhardt or Addington Symonds and challenge the easy antithesis of fantastic and fideistic Middle Ages versus logical and free-thinking Renaissance. And it is a prime justification of medieval studies that if properly pursued they soon dispose of such facile distinctions, and overthrow the barriers of narrow specialism and textbook chronology. In this sense medieval just as much as classical studies make men more humane. It would indeed be hard to separate in Lewis' culture the one from the other: just as hard as it is to understand the Middle Ages themselves without knowing classical literature or the Renaissance without knowing the Middle Ages. This continuity of literature and of learning Lewis not only asserted but embodied.
— Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis
The responsibility of literatuure is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
A Christian message or moral cannot redeem a text marred by shoddy workmanship.
— Susan Gallagher
But now books and men had gone their separate ways. Who has the patience for a book? Only a book.
— John M. Keller, Abracadabrantesque
If literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring.
— Georges Bataille
Writers block occurs when a writer has nothing to say. Unfortunately not all writers experience it.
— Ron Brackin
We are all orbits of some sort,circling around the world we call our own, and literature...Literature is a compass;
— Thabo Jijana, Failing Maths and My Other Crimes
He suddenly saw the enterprise of literature as essentially mad.
— Mark Beauregard, The Whale: A Love Story
Literature has become merely a tool for culture studies.
— Anuradha Bhattacharyya, One Word
Stories shape the world.
— Lance Conrad, The Price of Nobility
I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.
— Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
Literature is the product of a deep-seated need for honesty. Hence, those who lie most are struck most deeply by it, and those who are honest have no need for it.
— Anthony Marais
Of Books and Scribes there are no end:This Plague--and who can doubt it?Dismays me so, I've sadly pennedAnother book about it.
— Robert W. Service, The Pretender: A Story of the Latin Quarter
Quote of the day."Al, for want of anything better to do, is standing nodding his head. This reminds Faron of those stupid dogs that people put in their cars, that when the car moves, the dogs frantically nod their heads, like some demented, freshly graduated psychologist, with their first patients.
— Gary Edward Gedall
Of everythingI have ever endured,YOUareMy Favourite Tragedy.
— Meraaqi, Divine Trouble
There is a part of everything which is unexplored,because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown.
— Guy de Maupassant, Novele
The thing American people fear about corporations is that they might achieve too much power. We have an antipathy to power even as we admire it.
— Annie Proulx, Barkskins
Starving artist: starving for affection, starving for attention
— Jessica-Lynn Barbour, Willow
We dreamt of a crappy apartment somewhereMaking love while we let the midnight airFlow through the open window, into our closed heartsLeft bitter from heartbreak and too much time apart
— Jessica-Lynn Barbour
In the best day.
— Pankaj Mishra (#iampm)
When, while, while when you walk.
— Pankaj Mishra (#iampm)
No camouflage.
— Pankaj Mishra (#iampm)
Will I ever see the mountains or am I doomed to roam the flatlands?
— Jessica-Lynn Barbour, Willow
Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too.
— Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction
I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
— Mark Twain
Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and white?
— Virginia Woolf
Literature and film in my opinion are like saloons where bottles have no labels. I want to taste each one myself and figure out which is what. If I'm denied this by labelling, then my entertainment is considerably lessened.
— Saadat Hasan Manto, Why I Write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto
True love finds its own waysTo spread goodness, always.
— Ana Claudia Antunes, Pierrot Love: When A Call From The Other Side Takes Its Own Side
Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.
— Joan Didion
Behind every Plagiarism there is Google
— Vikash Shrivastava
I will never see the day where I choose to fall upon my own sword of refuge. In knowing this, I also know that you will never ultimately defeat me; for my life is my own, and I will see to it accordingly.
— Danish Sayanee
Reading literary works enlightened and sheltered me; now I'm paying back by writing.--"My Confession
— Zoë S. Roy, Calls Across the Pacific
POLONIUS : My Lord, I will use them according to their desert.HAMLET : God's bodykins man, better. Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.
— William Shakespeare
Now what I like about lit is that though you feel you know the characters involved, you don’t – you get all the benefits of having a relationship, with none of the mess.
— Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers
let us start by picturing the Japan archipelago lying in the sea by the Chinese mainland. If its proximity allowed it to become part of the Sinosphere and acquire a written culture, its distance benefited the development of indigenous writing. The Dover Strait, separating England and France, is only 34 kilometers (21 miles) wide. A fine swimmer can swim across it. In contrast, the shortest distance between Japan and the Korean Peninsula is five or six times greater, and between Japan and the Chinese mainland, twenty-five times greater. The current, moreover, is deadly. . . . Japan's distance from China gave it political and cultural freedom and made possible the flowering of its own writing.
— Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English
And what does a person with such romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics?"If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective, I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.
— Donna Tartt
She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after everyone else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
People are so annoying. All my pianists look exactly like poets
—  and all my poets look exactly like pianists.
In literature, as in love, one can only speak for himself.
— Andrew Lang
I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.
— Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air
You either see it or you don't
— Brian Selznick
I want all the books on the she
— E.L. Konigsburg, Talk, Talk : A Children's Book Author Speaks to Grown-Ups
It is raining! In other words little poems are coming down from the sky! Nature is literature! Sun is a fable
—  forest is a story
What would be the description of happines? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told.
— André Gide
To tell the truth, my dear count, I must own that of all nauseating human emanations, literature is one of those which disgust me most. I can see nothing in it but compromise and flattery. And I go so far as to doubt whether it can be anything else.
— André Gide
Since language is the only tool with which writers can reflect and shape a culture, it must be transformed into art. Language is not a limitation on the art of literature; it is a glorification. It has been the scaffolding inside which nations and philosophies have been built, and the language of literature has added the ornamental pediment by which the culture is remembered.
— E.L. Konigsburg, Talk, Talk : A Children's Book Author Speaks to Grown-Ups
I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress.
— Norman Mailer
The emotional pattern seems to be something like, “[Karl] Polanyi, a person of the left like me, says many true things, beautifully. Therefore his tales about what happened in economic history must be true.” Marx before him got similar treatment. Lately the more eloquent of the environmentalists, such as Wendell Berry, get it too. People want to believe that beauty is truth. A supporting emotional frame on the left arises from the very idea of historical progress: “We must be able to do so much better than this wretched capitalism.” It is not true, but it motivates.
— Deirdre N. McCloskey
The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through...ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly.
— Jonathan Franzen
Literature destabilizes thought by breaking open language and smuggling in sound, rhythm, and image--an invasion of aesthetics. More easily than analytic writing, poetry can emancipate itself from the standard definitions of words, enabling a breakthrough to new (and perhaps wayward or even nonsensical) meaning, which can then develop after the fact--different at each new reading. Literary language is presumptuous. It dips into the unknown in order to get nearer to a truth different from that of the superficially visible. As the poet Franz Josef Czernin described it, it is as though one step after another into emptiness could become a ladder. Literary writing can take the writers themselves by surprise; it can disturb and disappoint them--for stirring up turmoil is inherent in metaphor. Thus with every flash of understanding that comes from hearing or reading a poem, the fundamental work of thinking is taken up anew.
— Marie Luise Knott, Unlearning with Hannah Arendt
A union of literary and scientific cultures – there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come ... Davy himself was writing (and sometimes publishing) a good deal of poetry at the time; his notebooks mix details of chemical experiments, poems, and philosophical reflections all together; and these did not seem to exist in separate compartments in his mind.
— Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten
....And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time
— George Orwell
…the great thing about literature is that you can imagine
—  the great thing about film is that you can’t.
We bite back the things we can't say and we cushion every surface for the inevitable moment when they all come fighting out.
— Moïra Fowley-Doyle, The Accident Season
In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.
— Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
Line in nature is not found;Unit and universe are round;In vain produced, all rays return;Evil will bless, and ice will burn.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the ancients had been able to see it as I see it now, Mr. Palomar thinks, they would have thought they had projected their gaze into the heaven of Plato's ideas, or in the immaterial space of the postulates of Euclid; but instead, thanks to some misdirection or other, this sight has been granted to me, who fear it is too beautiful to be true, too gratifying to my imaginary universe to belong to the real world. But perhaps it is this same distrust of our senses that prevents us from feeling comfortable in the universe. Perhaps the first rule I must impose on myself is this: stick to what I see.
— Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar
Great Literature is simply language charged to the utmost with meaning
— Ezra Pound
You have never asked for anything, yet you have become an albatross around my neck. Your bony arms are knotted behind my head, I walk bowed under the weight of you.
— J.M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K
Everybody wants to have intimate conversations, but the smart fellows don't give out, only the fools. The smart fellows talk intimately about the fools, and examine them all over and give them advice.
— Saul Bellow, Seize the Day
They sat a few meters apart, speaking very rarely, and there was really only the noise of turning pages (…) Where Hans Hubermann and Erik Vandenburg were ultimately united by music, Max and Liesel were held together by the quiet gathering of words."Hi, Max.""Hi, Liesel."They would sit and read.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
The stories we read in books, what's presented to us as being interesting - they have very little to do with real life as it's lived today. I'm not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires, serial killers, codes hidden in paintings, and so on. I mean so-called serious literature. A boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father, a bereaved woman befriends an asylum seeker, a composer with a rare neurological disorder walks around New York, thinking about the nature of art. People looking back over their lives, people having revelations, people discovering meaning. Meaning, that's the big thing. The way these books have it, you trip over a rock you'll find some hidden meaning waiting there. Everyone's constantly on the verge of some soul-shaking transformation. And it's - if you'll forgive my language - it's bullshit. Modern people live in a state of distraction. They go from one distraction to the next, and that's how they like it. They don't transform, they don't stop to smell the roses, they don't sit around recollecting long passages of their childhood - Jesus, I can hardly remember what I was doing two days ago. My point is, people aren't waiting to be restored to some ineffable moment. They're not looking for meaning. That whole idea of the novel - that's finished.
— Paul Murray, The Mark and the Void
A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle. It is together, in an act of imaginary consummation, that the story is born. This act wholly involves us, as any marriage would, and just as no marriage is exactly the same as another, so each of us interprets a story differently, feels for it differently.
— Yann Martel
There is something in this January Siberian landscape that overpowers, oppresses, stuns. Above all, it is its enormity, its boundlessness, its oceanic limitlessness. The earth has no end here; the world has no end. Man is no created for such measureless. For him a comfortable, palpable, serviceable measure is the measure of his village, his field, street, house. At sea, the size of the ship's deck will be such a measure. Man is created for the kind of space that he can traverse at one try, with a single effort.
— Ryszard Kapuściński, Imperium
I call that creativity," Orville said. "The purpose of literature is to teach you how to THINK, not how to be practical. Learning to discover the connective tissue between seemingly unrelated events is the only way we are equipped to understand patterns in the real world.
— Catherine Lowell, The Madwoman Upstairs
I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely.
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.
— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. That is the cause of the contradictions in the novel.
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.
— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
it would be fairer to say I have traveled widely, without ever leaving my own native soil, I've traveled, one might say, through literature, each time I've opened a book the pages echoed with a noise like the dip of a paddle in midstream, and throughout my odyssey I never crossed a single border, and so never had to produce a passport, I'd just pick a destination at random, setting my prejudices firmly to one side, and be welcomed with open arms in places swarming with weird and wonderful characters
— Alain Mabanckou, Broken Glass
I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.
— Jorge Luis Borges
A very small class of books have nothing in common say that each admits us to a world of its own that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it, but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him.
— Philip Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
Words contain the "souls" or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness.
— Philip Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.
— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
Estragon: You see, you feel worse when I'm with you. I feel better alone, too.Vladmir: Then why do you always come crawling back?Estragon: I don't know.
— Samuel Beckett
Feeling its power, one Civil War paper trumpeted that Milton and Homer were for another age but for this one was the New York Herald.
— Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion
A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind’s eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own – a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets.
— Sara Sheridan, On Starlit Seas
Reading is an intimate act, perhaps more intimate than any other human act. I say that because of the prolonged (or intense) exposure of one mind to another.
— Harold Brodkey
There are people who, the more you do for them, the less they will do for themseselves.
— Jane Austen
The writer is neither saint nor tzaddik nor prophet standing at the gate
—  he's just another sinner who has a somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe the inconceivable reality of our world.
The discovery of the horror tale at an early age was fortuitous for me. This sort of tale serves, in many ways, the very same purpose as fairy tales did in our childhood. It operates as a theater of the mind in which internal conflicts are played out. In these tales we can parade the most reprehensible aspects of our being: cannibalism, incest, parricide. It allows us to discuss our anxieties and even to contemplate the experience of death in absolute safety.And again, like a fairy tale, horror can serve as a liberating or repressive social tool, and it is always an accurate reflection of the social climate of its time and the place where it gets birthed.
— Guillermo del Toro
Real life often ends badly, like our marriage did, Pat. And literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for people to endure nobly.
— Matthew Quick, The Silver Linings Playbook
This reasoning is based on the wishful thinking that genius can only be earned through education and hard work. It denies the time-proven truth that genius can strike like a random bolt of lightning, at any time in any place, even in a humble glover's home in a small town in Elizabethan England.
— Andrea Mays, The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger’s Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare’s First Folio
These (Shakespeare, Milton, and Victor Hugo) not only knit and knot the logical texture of the style with all the dexterity and strength of prose; they not only fill up the pattern of the verse with infinite variety and sober wit; but they give us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, by the art, comparable to that of counterpoint, with which they follow at the same time, and now contrast, and now combine, the double pattern of the texture and the verse.  Here the sounding line concludes; a little further on, the well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and both will reach their solution on the same ringing syllable.  The best that can be offered by the best writer of prose is to show us the development of the idea and the stylistic pattern proceed hand in hand, sometimes by an obvious and triumphant effort, sometimes with a great air of ease and nature.  The writer of verse, by virtue of conquering another difficulty, delights us with a new series of triumphs.  He follows three purposes where his rival followed only two; and the change is of precisely the same nature as that from melody to harmony.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays in the Art of Writing
In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.
— Italo Calvino, Six Memos For The Next Millennium
I think that my first impulse arises from a hypersensitivity or allergy. It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably. Please don't think that my reaction is the result of intolerance towards my neighbor: the worst discomfort of all comes from hearing myself speak. That's why I try to talk as little as possible. If I prefer writing, it is because I can revise each sentence until I reach the point where - if not exactly satisfied with my words - I am able at least to eliminate those reasons for dissatisfaction that I can put a finger on. Literature - and I mean the literature that matches up to those requirements - is the promised land in which language becomes what it really ought to be.
— Italo Calvino, Six Memos For The Next Millennium
Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement.
— Italo Calvino, Six Memos For The Next Millennium
I wished, first of all, to buy my way into people's good graces with my book so that, in subsequent personal contact, I would find the ground already prepared, and, I reasoned, if I succeeded in implanting in their soules a favorable image of me, this image would in turn shape me; and so, willy-nilly, I would become mature.
— Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke
Popular versus literary—a false divide?
— Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins
I immediately thought of the stars. Stars. Heavenly bodies formed by huge clouds of dust and gas bumpinginto one another, getting bigger, their gravity getting stronger. Once hot enough, nuclear fusion occurs. And then a star is formed.People are shaped in a similar way—just like stars—excessive amounts of dust and hot gas. And like stars, everyone’s life has a turning point prior to their big bang. The shit show before the creation. Y ’know, one of those moments that can fuck you up.Cleopatra’s was when her father named her joint regent at fourteen. Fucked-up.Bruce Wayne’s when he witnessed his parents get murdered. Fucked-up.Charles Manson’s when his mother sold him for a pitcher of beer. Fucked. Up.Not to mention 'Helter Skelter.
— Jorge Enrique Ponce
What is life but a fucked-up factory fabricating fuckups?
— Jorge Enrique Ponce, F*KTORY, Vol. 1: Fabricating Fuck-Ups
Our existence has always and everywhere been tragic, but man has converted these numberless tragedies into works of art. I know of nothing more astonishing or more wonderful than this transformation.
— Maxim Gorky
A picture is worth a thousand words, but the way I paint I'm going to need to contact an editor. Even if I were to abstractly paint the phrase "I love you," it would be the visual equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses.-James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz
— James Lee Schmidt, liQUID PROse QUOtes
Like some wondrous birds out of fairy tales, books sang their songs to me and spoke to me as though communing with one languishing in prison; they sang of the variety and richness of life, of man’s audacity in his strivings towards goodness and beauty.
— Maxim Gorky
Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Literature tries to express the intricate inner beauties of life. Philosophy tries to explain the intricate inner beauties and conflicts of thoughts.
— Debasish Mridha
My idea of literature, as I have often said, is that it should save lives. My idea of literature is that it once did save lives, and was of consequence in that way. I believe it can do so again. With every book, to the best of my ability, I try to put this belief in action, even if, as in some of the recent books, the best way to save lives is to cause laughter. Bring on your problems, and I will listen, and bear witness, and when the occasion permits, I will respond, according to certain general rules, on this page, in this hope that here too words may be redemptive.
— Rick Moody
Literature endures like the universal spirit,And its breath becomes a part of the vitals of all men.
— Li Shang-yin
The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.
— Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto
A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated—as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.
— Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto
In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other.That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.
— Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto