c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I shall tell you what I believe. I believe God is a librarian. I believe that literature is holy...it is that best part of our souls that we break off and give each other, and God has a special dispensation for it, angels to guard its making and its preservation.
— Sarah  Smith, Chasing Shakespeares
...with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature.
— P.G. Wodehouse
There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.
— William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell
If a teacher has only love for the cause, it will be a good teacher. If a teacher has only love for student, as a father, mother, he will be better than the teacher, who read all the books, but has no love for the cause, nor to the students. If the teacher combines love to the cause and to his disciples, he is the perfect teacher.
— Leo Tolstoy
If you want to know a country, read its writers.
— Aminatta Forna
But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful? It is. Only I do get tired.
— Melanie Benjamin, Alice I Have Been
There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
— Henry James
You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as ROBINSON CRUSOE never was written, and never will be written again. I have tried that book for years—generally in combination with a pipe of tobacco—and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life. When my spirits are bad—ROBINSON CRUSOE. When I want advice—ROBINSON CRUSOE. In past times when my wife plagued me; in present times when I have had a drop too much—ROBINSON CRUSOE. I have worn out six stout ROBINSON CRUSOES with hard work in my service. On my lady's last birthday she gave me a seventh. I took a drop too much on the strength of it; and ROBINSON CRUSOE put me right again. Price four shillings and sixpence, bound in blue, with a picture into the bargain. 
— Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.
— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Nobody could catch cold by the sea; nobody wanted appetite by the sea; nobody wanted spirits; nobody wanted strength. Sea air was healing, softening, relaxing -- fortifying and bracing -- seemingly just as was wanted -- sometimes one, sometimes the other. If the sea breeze failed, the seabath was the certain corrective; and where bathing disagreed, the sea air alone was evidently designed by nature for the cure.
— Jane Austen, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon
Did you think of anything when Miss Marcy said Scoatney Hall was being re-opened? I thought of the beginning of Pride and Prejudice – where Mrs. Bennet says 'Netherfield Park is let a last.' And then Mr. Bennet goes over to call on the rich new owner.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.
— David Mitchell, Black Swan Green
What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And -- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall-- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing. ((p. 62, Reading & Writing)
— V.S. Naipaul
But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight — matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.
— Leon Wieseltier
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
— Roland Barthes
Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.
— Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.
— David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
A novel works it's magic by putting a reader inside another person's life. The pace is as slow as life. It's as detailed as life. It requires you, the reader, to fill in an outline of words with vivid pictures drawn subconsciously from your own life, so that the story feels more personal than the sets designed by someone else and handed over via TV or movies. Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up. It's why you might find yourself crying, even if you aren't the crying kind.
— Barbara Kingsolver
But he'll never be fully recognised, because Scots literature these days is all about complaining and moaning and being injured in one's soul.
— Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club
Speech is the body part of thinking, the voice of the mind. Writing is the blood and mind mixing to speak through the fingers, through the hands.
— Lenora Champagne
The text contains no literary criticism. I wanted to describe books, not to be clever at their expense.
— Kenneth McLeish, Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide
A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibilit. But again, to exist mean: 'being-in-the-world.' Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities.
— Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel
In the course of time, Michael Strogoff reached a high station in the Empire. But it is not the history of his success, but the history of his trials, which deserves to be related.
— Jules Verne, Michael Strogoff
Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.
— Terry Eagleton
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.
— Susan Sontag
What a tribute this is to art
—  what a misfortune this is for history. (In reference to Shakespeare's 'Richard III')
What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place.
— Elif Batuman
We men of this age are rotten with book-lore and with a yearning for the past.
— James Elroy Flecker, The Last Generation A Story of the Future
Knowing, above all, that I would come looking, and find what he had left for me, all that remained of The Jungle Book in the pocket of his doctor’s coat, that folder-up, yellowed page torn from the back of the book, with a bristle of thick, coarse hairs clenced inside. Galina, says my grandfather’s handwriting, above and below a child’s drawing of the tiger, who is curved like the blade of a scimitar across the page. Galina, it says, and that is how I know to find him again, in Galina, in the story he hadn’t told me but perhaps wished he had.
— Téa Obreht
Not thou alone, but all humanity doth in its progress fable emulate. Whence came thy rocket-ships and submarine if not from Nautilus, from Cavorite? Your trustiest companions since the cave, we apparitions guided mankind's tread, our planet, unseen counterpart to thine, as permanent, as ven'rable, as true. On dream's foundation matter's mudyards rest. Two sketching hands, each one the other draws: the fantasies thou've fashioned fashion thee.
— Alan Moore, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier
Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that.
— Edward de Bono, I Am Right You Are Wrong: From This to the New Renaissance: From Rock Logic to Water Logic
Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my heart to Job's cry, or to Jeremiah's, or to the Second Isaiah. I do not read them as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too.
— Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic
Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented the sword.
— Walter Kirn, Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever
It began in mystery and it will end in mystery, but what a rare and beautiful country lies in between.
— Diane Ackerman
Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries -- slave of prejudice … slave of religious fanaticism … slave of barbarity and inhumanity.
— Saadat Hasan Manto
You must remember that no one lives a life free from pain and suffering.
— Sophocles
When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature
— Tzvetan Todorov
It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.
— M.H. Abrams
There is much to discover that's not on the back cover!
— E.A. Bucchianeri
There's a saying," Aeneas said: "Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts." He spoke wryly. "Horses, particularly.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.
— Charles Baxter, Believers: A novella and stories
A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe.
— Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of them, an earnest type, started asking the questions. “Miss O’Connor,” he said, “why was the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, “Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?” “He does not,” I said. He looked crushed. “Well, Miss O’Connor,” he said, “what is the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that’s what’s happening to the teaching of literature.
— Flannery O'Connor
We were supposed to be an English literature class, but Miss Nesbitt used literature to teach real life. She said she didn't have time to teach us like a regular English teacher--we were too far behind. Instead, she taught us the world through literature.
— Phillip M. Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice
Genuine bravery for a writer.... It is about calmly speaking the truth when everyone else is silenced, when the truth cannot be expressed. It is about speaking out with a different voice, risking the wrath of the state and offending everyone, for the sake of the truth, and the writer’s conscience.
— Murong Xuecun
If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.
— Susan Sontag
The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We’re increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.
— Lev Grossman
It is difficult to call myself a writer, even when I stand at a podium to receive a prize, I feel uncomfortable calling myself a writer—I am merely a word criminal.
— Murong Xuecun
Is there just one single love in a lifetime? Are all our lovers ― from the first to the last, including the most fleeting ― part of that unique love, and is each of them merely an expression of it, a variation, a particular version? In the same way that in literature there is just one true masterpiece to which different writers give a particular form (taking the twentieth century alone: Joyce, who explores everything happening inside his character;s head with microscopic precision; Proust, for whom the present is merely a memory of the past; Kafka, who drifts on the margins between dream and reality; the blind Borges, probably the one I relate to best, etc).
— Dai Sijie, Once on a Moonless Night
I just can't get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they want is a fairy tale.
— China Miéville
This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘serious’ courses replete with ‘trends ’ and ‘schools ’ and ‘myths ’ and ‘symbols ’ and ‘social comment ’ and something unspeakably spooky called ‘climate of thought.’ Actually these ‘serious’ courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books.
— Vladimir Nabokov
All hen are created equal but some have more feather than others.
— Viken Berberian
I have a plot, but not much happens.
— Howard Nemerov
Mr. Herbert DemarestAlexander Hamilton Jr. High2236 Bedford AvenueBrooklyn NYDear Mr Demarest, Then why don't you give him 'Withering Heights'? At least Heathcoat knew how to kick some ass.Chas. Banks3d Base
— Steve Kluger, Last Days of Summer
The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.
— Charles Simic, The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs
The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on aberration and artifice, the decadents' approach to the language of fiction frequently leans towards the baroque and the obscure.
— Asti Hustvedt, The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France
Literature suffers because writers give their books to colleagues who will then write glowing reviews or saccharine introductions.
— F. Sionil José, In Search of the Word: Selected Essays
Moral writing is boring.
— Johan Van Wyk
If [literature] should turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society will slip back into the sty of the immediate -- which is to say, the memoryless existence of hymenoptera and gastropods. None of this is so important, to be sure. The world can get by nicely without literature. But without human beings it can get by better yet.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
I should point out, creating one's own style, as much as is required to illustrate one of the aspects, the golden seam of language, involves beginning again at once, in a different manner, adopting the guise of a pupil when one risked becoming pedantic - thus by a shrugging of one's shoulders, disconcerting some with their genuflecting stance, and immortalizing oneself in multiple, impersonal, or even anonymous forms in response to the gesture of arms raised in stupefaction.
— Stéphane Mallarmé, Mallarmé in Prose
The Meadow... Only one of them succeeded in making a life here... He weathered. Before a backdrop of natural beauty, he lived a life from which everything was taken but a place. He lived so close to the real world it almost let him in.
— James Galvin, The Meadow
A history of literature, unlike history as such, ought to list only victories, for its defeats are no victory for anyone.
— Julien Gracq
And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference b
— Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Thence it is possible to arrive by easy stages at the happy notion, not uncommon among 'intellectuals', that taste consists of distaste, and that the loftiest of pleasures is that of feeling displeased; and thus to end by enjoying almost nothing in literature but one's own opinions, while oneself incapable of writing a living sentence.
— F.L. Lucas, Style
Her seven-year-old self had decided that stealing books was morally bankrupt, but since the books hadn’t actually left the library—they’d merely been relocated—it wasn’t technically stealing. Echo looked around at her sea of tomes, and a single word came to mind: Tsundoku. It was the Japanese word for letting books pile up without reading them all.
— Melissa Grey, The Girl at Midnight
Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. Reckless O soul, exploring. I with thee and thou with me. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared go. And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all.
— Walt Whitman
I’ve only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel.
— Roman Payne
The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home." Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.
— Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
What good literature can do and does do—far greater than any importation of morality—is touch the human soul.
— Karen Swallow Prior
A book isn't a single, static thing with one unarguable meaning. Each reader who comes to it brings his own special knowledge, habits and attitudes. Each reader reads a different book. Each reader imagines a different 
— Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage
A word (...) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (...) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer.
— John Fowles
Language is the medium of literature, and the state of the language at any time can hardly fail to carry literary consequences.
— J.A. Burrow, Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature and Its Background 1100-1500
The singular power of literature lies not in its capacity for accurate representation of mass commonalities, but its ability to illuminate the individual life in a way that expands our understanding of some previously unseen or unarticulated aspect of existence.
— Nicole Krauss
We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Actually, I am a coward. I say only what is safe to say, and I criticise only what is permissable to criticise.
— Murong Xuecun
there are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitionersof them
— David Morrell
Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
— E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
— A.S. Byatt, Possession
Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.
— Don DeLillo, Point Omega
The only truth is that we cannot speak the truth . The only acceptable viewpoint is that we cannot express a viewpoint.
— Murong Xuecun
Jonah-John-if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still-not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places, at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle
Don't forget to speak scornfully of the Victorian Age; there will be time for meekness when you try to better it. Very soon you will be Victorian or that sort of thing yourselves; next session probably, when the freshman come up.
— J.M. Barrie, Courage
Why is contemporary China short of works that speak directly? Because we writers cannot speak directly, or rather we can only speak in an indirect way.Why does contemporary China lack good works that critique our current situation? Because our current situation may not be critiqued. We have not only lost the right to criticise, but the courage to do so.Why is modern China lacking in great writers? Because all the great writers are castrated while still in the nursery.
— Murong Xuecun
Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish literature, not German literature, at least for the first two years of his university career, among other sad reasons because he dreamed of being a writer.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
Good literature boils down to two things: How interesting is the story you are telling, and how interesting is your telling.
— Hillel F. Damron, Very Narrow Bridge
The writer of fiction is not a scholar but an artist impacted emotionally by characters from life, who then strives to present these in his works. These characters present us with human truth but do not necessarily represent social truth.
— Alaa Al Aswany, نيران صديقة
The literary text seems like "a fortified medieval town –foreigners and outsiders are repelled, or allowed in only after rigorous checks, but within all is bustling life; exchange, mutual interdependence and influence are the rule.
— Jeremy Hawthorn, Unlocking the Text: Fundamental Issues in Literary Theory
Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. 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.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails…and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.”— Anonymous Curse on Book Theives from the Monaster of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain
— Anatole Broyard
We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This refusal, indeed, is literature's most moral act. At a time when meanings are manifold, disparate, and always changing, the rich possibility of interpretation--the happy resistance of the text to ever be fully known and mastered--is one of the most exhilarating products of human culture.
— Marjorie Garber
The art teacher's scarlet book was called Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. 'As the title suggests,' Mr Dunwoody saw the book'd caught my attention, 'it's about the history of opticians. What are you about?
— David Mitchell, Black Swan Green
I speak this way because I know how perilous speech can be.... A saber might be stopped by a shield. A bullet might be dodged by a stroke of luck. But you can't dodge a word. If one is flung at you it will hit its mark unerringly. No Garritt there's nothing in the world more dangerous than talk.
— Galen Beckett, The Magicians and Mrs. Quent
The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.
— Mark Twain
To have all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern taskmasters they had been at school, was a most novel and delightful effect.
— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
The sign of a good novel is what it can cause its reader to see, even if this lies beyond the author's own vision.
— John Gaddis, The Cold War
...what distinguishes pulp fiction from great literature is how emphatically the work challenges us to interpret it.
— Bruce Meyer, The Golden Thread:  A Reader's Journey Through The Great Books
Inequality was the price of civilization.
— George Orwell, 1984
When you've got a thing to say, Say it! Don't take half a day.When your tale's got little in itCrowd the whole thing in a minute! Life is short--a fleeting vapor--Don't you fill the whole blamed paperWith a tale which, at a pinch, Could be cornered in an inch!Boil her down until she simmers,Polish her until she glimmers.
— Joel Chandler Harris
Too many writers are trying to write with too shallow an education. Whether they go to college or not is immaterial...a good writer needs a sense of the history of literature to be successful as a writer.
— James Kisner
In literature one has the best company in the world at complete command; one also has the worst. One has a social conscience which dissuades one from harbouring unprofitable company in life, and I find that my two canons are a great aid and support for an analogous literary conscience which speaks up against consorting with unprofitable company in literature.
— Albert Jay Nock
Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.
— Joyce Carol Oates, Expensive People
Bah! You want to hear the vilest thing a man’s done and you want him to be a hero at the same time!
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality.'Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.—Literature and Evil
— Georges Bataille
We can sum up the surrealist distinction between 'literature' and 'poetry' by saying where the former is artificial, fictive and elusive, the latter is natural, real, direct and spontaneous.
— Michael Richardson, Dedalus Book of Surrealism 2: The Myth of the World
Howard adores Sam's looks. He loves the strong cut of jaw made satin with thickening peach fuzz, loses himself in the green eyes. Howard stares at them like a lover, but always obliquely. (Sometimes we watch our son from a distance. "I wonder what he's thinking," Howard will say.)
— Chandler Burr, You or Someone Like You
As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody's albatross.
— Patrick White
It is precisely, if paradoxically, because reversal is in the service of repetition (so as to ensure, alongside its companion strategies, a dizzying proliferation of citations) that it gains a subversive power rather than remain a mere dependent (and thus conservative) form of social discourse. Reversal plays a double role in this novel (MONSIEUR VENUS), for it is not only a formal strategy bearing on citation, but itself a citation as well; one more cliché mobilized from the fin-de-siecle reserve.
— Janet Beizer
Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in their excess of words, not events. The surface of the texts, the sound of the words, point to themselves as manufactured, as illusion. The decadents attempted to create texts that announced themselves as artifice.
— Asti Hustvedt, The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France
So much of life is invisible, inscrutable: layers of thoughts, feelings, outward events entwined with secrecies, ambiguities, ambivalences, obscurities, darknesses strongly present even to the one who's lived it- maybe especially to the one who's lived it. I didn't seek to find her, wandered instead within and among her fragments of language-notebooks, drafts, journals, fictions, letters, essays, and found there whole worlds like spinning planets, lived in their cold light and burning light, wondering where I was, where they might take me. Curious, I heard a monster's voice and followed-
— Laurie Sheck, A Monster's Notes
And that is to say, of course, that you can "read" a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the balance with each other.
— Richard Mitchell
A stubborn refusal of the conditions of 20th Century 'reality', surrealism has denied intransigently and consistently that modern man can live without a sense of wonder at the world that was once embodied in myth. In approaching literature, it has aimed at restoring to the word its magical qualities. And at giving back to language the elemental power it once had within society. This determinism lies at the heart of the surrealist attitude and distinguishes it radically from the modernism which took shape contemporaneously with it.
— Michael Richardson, Dedalus Book of Surrealism 2: The Myth of the World
The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excuse the use of that second word, because I realize it's presumptuous. Also, excuse the first word, and the term in general.
— Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!
Speaking about time’s relentless passage, Powell’s narrator compares certain stages of experience to the game of Russian Billiards as once he used to play it with a long vanished girlfriend. A game in which, he says,  “...at the termination of a given passage of time...the hidden gate goes down...and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity."
— Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement
Understand is not the word; you are right, you can never really 'understand' about someone, anyone, even yourself. It is best to believe in them as human; feel that they are alive like you and need warmth, concern.
— Rudy Wiebe
(from his random observations after reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens)In the Old Curiosity Shop I discovered that in the character of Dick Swiveller, Dickens provided P.G. Wodehouse with pretty much the whole of his oeuvre. In David Copperfield, David's bosses Spenlow and Jorkins are what must be the earliest fictional representations of good cop/bad cop.
— Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set the foundations? An answer to this question must be found if one is to produce anything vital and hence lasting. All this disturbs me so much that I no longer like to be spoken to about it.
— Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature.
— Carlos Fuentes, Christopher Unborn
As George Russell defined a literary movement: “Five or six men who live in the same town and hate each other.
— Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia 1910-1960
Harold Bloom weeps for me.
— Christian Bauman
He who writes to his beloved every day, is not a lover, but a writer.
— Dr. Kyaciss Pfiell
All the great stories are about obsession and people who are obsessed.
— Marty Rubin
An author who does not support his or her characters does not deserve the support of readers. EVER!
— Johanna Oznowicz
During his extensive career as an airmail pilot with Aéropostale, Antoine served as the company’s station manager in barren Villa Bens. During the Second World War, although he was older than most, Saint-Exupéry joined the Free French Air Force. On July 31, 1944, as fate would have it, he disappeared on a reconnaissance mission flying a P-38 Lightning over the Mediterranean, somewhere south of Marseille. The body of a French pilot was found a few days after Antoine’s disappearance and was buried in Carqueiranne, France. After his death he became an icon and national hero throughout France. For a fleeting moment I wondered what anyone could do to pass the time of day at such a remote location…. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry used his time to write books!Today the word Aéropostale takes on an entirely new meaning. It has become the name of an American retailer of casual apparel for young people. Go figure….
— Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater Two...."
6 criteria to upgrade literary production; Correct language, the power of the idea, the fluency in expressing, the connection between ideas and the depth of their meanings, the characters movements towards high convictions whether in the beginning or in the middle, and the ending must serves ideals and values and accomplishes victory to the human beings.
— Maryam Abdullah Alnaymi
The world of numbers and words is odd. A number is the only word that doesn’t lie and words can be very deceitful
—  they create the illusion that a large number hides a great word.
My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time . . .
— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Their ghosts are gagged, their books are library flotsam,Some of their names - not all - we learnt in schoolBut, life being short, we rarely read their poems,Mere source-books now to point or except a rule,While those opinions which rank them high are basedOn a wish to be different or on lack of taste.
— Louis MacNeice
I see the process of reaching out, sharing yourself, communicating, establishing contact between two people as similar to, if not the same as, the interaction between two people entering a relationship in literature – that is, as reader and writer. Both seem to have the same astounding possibilities and the same terrible pitfalls. But if you battle through and souls touch, magic happens. Love. We feel more human, more alive, more understood, naked and yet protected from the cold of isolation and indifference. Our loneliness is, temporarily, held at bay.
— Karina Szczurek, The Fifth Mrs Brink: A Memoir
If you read a lot, you will know a lot.
— Michael Ender
Her book has perhaps been a good one; it has refreshed, refilled, rewarmed her heart; it has set her brain astir, furnished her mind with pictures.
— Charlotte Brontë, Shirley
In the Dictionary 'lumpy jaw' comes just before 'lunacy,' but in life there are no such clues. Suddenly, for no reason, you might start to dribble from the mouth, to howl peevishly at the moon. You might start quoting your mother, out loud and with conviction. You might lose your friends to the most uninspired of deaths. You might one day wake up and find yourself teaching at a community college; there will have been nothing to warn you. You might say things to your students like, There is only one valid theme in literature: Life will disappoint you.
— Lorrie Moore, Anagrams
Did she feel pity for me, did she want me to suffer?The next morning she led me to the coat closet, which faces the living room, she went in with me, we were in there all day, although she knew he wouldn’t come until the afternoon, it was too small, we needed more space between us, we needed Nothing Places, she said “This is what it’s felt like, except you weren’t here.” We looked at each other in silence for hours.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: "You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flo
— Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950
Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: "You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal 
— Cesare Pavese
There is more to hear in what is not said.
— Joyce Rachelle
Irony alone is damning.The flesh will be bland and you will believe you are forever reading the same book.
— Anne Garréta, Not One Day
Good literature is a mirror through which we see ourselves more clearly.
— Mark Frost, The Secret History of Twin Peaks
Literature that awakens and inflames feelings is the food of hearts.
— Ahmed Mayouf
But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life's mundane matters. "Who are the best musicians for these songs?" "Am I recording in the right studio?" "Is this song in the right key?" Some things never change, even in 400 years.Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, "Are my songs literature?"So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.
— Bob Dylan
The fact about contemporaries is that they're doing the same thing on another railway line: one resents their distracting one, flashing past, the wrong way- something like that: from timidity, partly, one keeps one's eyes on one's own road.
— Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Four, 1929-1931
I haven't re-read Kafka for forty years. I had a second read-through when first teaching English at the University of Warwick in the 1970s, but since then have not been tempted to return. The reason for this, I suspect, is that he is a young person's writer, not in the sense that only the young can appreciate him, but because on first exposure he is so comprehensively and unexpectedly formative that you may never feel the need to read him again. He becomes part of you, and your mind and spirit and view of the human condition are inhabited by his stories, his views, and especially his characters: by poor persecuted Josef K., by Gregor Samsa trapped in his rotting shell, by the hunger artist, yearning to find something, anything, that is actually good to eat, by poor K., who can't get into the castle to visit the Authorities. Kafkaesque: a world incomprehensible, alienating and threatening, absurd. We visit it with incomprehension and at our peril, lost at all points, disorientated, inoculated against faith, searchers for meaning in a book - and universe that either has none, or in which it lurks inaccessibly. Once you have read Kafka, you know this.
— Rick Gekoski, Lost, Stolen or Shredded: Stories of Missing Works of Art and Literature
I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course – I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the Midwest to Leechfield, then spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother’s front porch reading Homer (or Ovid or Virgil) and waiting for someone to ask me what I was reading. No one ever did. People asked me what I was drinking, how much I weighed, where I was living, and if I had married yet, but no one gave me a chance to deliver my lecture on Great Literature.
— Mary Karr, The Liars' Club
If Bengali is my mother, then English is my father and friend.
— Abhijit Naskar, Human Making is Our Mission: A Treatise on Parenting
We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention.
— Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines
Death, like fiction, is brutal in its symmetry. Take this story and strip it down -all the way back- until you are left with two points. Two dots on a vast, blank canvas, separeted by a sea of white. Here, we have come to the first point, where the batj is drawn and the hand is reachinh for the razor blade. I will meet you at the next, by the axle of a screaming wheel, the revolution of a clock, the closing of an orbit.
— Lang Leav, Sad Girls
This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, of listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one's own, of getting out of the boundaries of one's own experience. There's a currently popular argument that books help us feel empathy, but if they do so they do it by helping us imagine that we are people we are not. Or to go deeper within ourselves, to be more aware of what it means to be heartbroken, or ill, or six, or ninety-six, or completely lost. Not just versions of our self rendered awesome and eternally justified and always right, living in a world in which other people only exist to help reinforce our magnificence, though those kinds of books and movies exist in abundance to cater to the male imagination. Which is a reminder that literature and art can also help us fail at empathy if it sequesters us in the Big Old Fortress of Magnificent Me.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions
Literature works from mind to mind and is more progenitive. It is at once more universal and more poignantly particular. If it speaks of bread or wine or stone or tree, it appeals to the whole of these things, to their ideas; yet each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal embodiment in his imagination. Should the story say 'he ate bread', the dramatic producer or painter can only show 'a piece of bread' according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in general and picture it in some form of his own. If a story says 'he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below', the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but especially out of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien on Fairy-stories
In the wildlife sanctuaries of literature, we study the species of speech, the flight patterns of individual words, the herd behavior of words together, and we learn what language does and why it matters. this is excellent training for going out into the world and looking at all the unhallowed speech of political statements and news headlines and CDC instructions and seeing how it makes the word or in this case, makes a mess of it. It is the truest, highest purpose of language to make things clear and help us see; when words are used to do the opposite you know you're in trouble and maybe that there's a cover-up.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions
Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy, politics, or institutionalised religion. At its strongest - Johnson, Hazlitt, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and Paul Valéer, among others - it is a kind of wisdom literature, and so a meditation upon life. Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.
— Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life
Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.
— Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination
In the present day, when popular literature is running into the low levels of life, and luxuriating on the vices and follies of mankind; and when the universal pursuit of gain is trampling down the early growth of poetic feeling, and wearing out the verdure of the soul, I question whether it would not be of service for the reader occasionally to turn to these records of prouder times and loftier modes of thinking; and to steep himself to the very lips in old Spanish romance.
— Washington Irving, Tales of the Alhambra
As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition — I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.
— Rachel Cusk
It was hard to decide on a literature course. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that 19th century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.
— Elif Batuman, The Idiot
Poems are surmountable. They have rhymes and rhythms to help you make meaning. They're short enough. . . to read and reread until you've made some sense of them. Short stories are a different ballgame. You read them and understand the words completely. You know what happens in each sentence. You follow the dialogue and action. at the end, you know exactly what's happened. And also you have no idea.
— Laurie Frankel, The Atlas of Love