c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The American's literature is all about being hot and sexy, inspiring a girl and going to bed with her. It focuses on being a hero, saving lives and surviving last, but it has nothing to do with dignity, serenity.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men.
— Heather O'Neill, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night
So Matilda's strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea.
— Roald Dahl, Matilda
I can hear the library humming in the night,  a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,  Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,  each one stitched into his own private coat,  together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.
— Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
All choice of words is slang. It marks a class.” “There is correct English: that is not slang.” “I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.
— Ernst Fischer
Great language and great literature do not survive long without each other
— Lance Conrad, The Price of Creation
This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers, challenging authority, whereas in our permissive society it feels that it is being used merely to create the occasional pleasing contrast to the general ballooning of verbiage.
— Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature
When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you're going to get from me, as each of you turns sixteen, is a library of the one hundred books that gave me the most pleasure when I was a know-nothing adolescent.
— Mordecai Richler, Barney's Version
The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.
— Fernando Pessoa
He gave it its present name, and lived here shut up: day and night poring over the wicked heaps of papers in the suit, and hoping against hope to disentangle it from its mystification and bring it to a close. In the meantime, the place became dilapidated, the wind whistled through the cracked walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, the weeds choked the passage to the rotting door. When I brought what remained of him home here, the brains seemed to me to have been blown out of the house too; it was so shattered and ruined.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience.
— Ralph Ellison
Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else’s past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times.
— Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books
On THE AMBER SPYGLASS:"If this plotline was a motorist, it would have been arrested for driving while intoxicated, if it had not perished in the horrible drunk accident where it went headlong over the cliff of the author's preachy message, tumbled down the rocky hillside, crashed, and burned.
— John C. Wright, Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth
He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if disappointment in love, and total solitude, had not conspired to bring on a relapse.
— Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey
If I could change the attitude of young men toward literature, I would want them to read not just for escape, but because literature can be more truthful about things like sex, commitment, and aging. It can be more truthful about the stuff that our parents lied to us (and themselves) about, and the stuff that everyone has to lie about. It can all be dealt with truthfully in fiction and poetry.
— Lorin Stein
Knowing that others want to read my writing is the greatest inspiration to write.
— David    Rose
But when the wizard is onstage as the main character, you have to adopt what I call the Jack Vance Rule. I call it this because Jack Vance is the first author successfully and adroitly to have applied this rule in his The Dying Earth. The Jack Vance Rule is: (1) The wizard has to be able to do something unusual, or else he is not a wizard, (2) he cannot do everything, or else there is no drama; therefore (3) the story teller has to communicate to the reader whatever the dividing line is that separates what the wizard can do from what he cannot do, so that the reader can have a reasonable expectation of knowing what the wizard can and cannot do.
— John C. Wright, Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth
The literature of impotence is about to develop beyond measure.
— Julien Torma, 4 Dada Suicides: Selected Texts of Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma, and Jacques Vaché
Childhood only comes around once. Make your child's memories special. Take them on a new adventure each day. It is as simple as opening a book.
— K. Lamb
Imagine the same scene in HAMLET if Pullman had written it. Hamlet, using a mystic pearl, places the poison in the cup to kill Claudius. We are all told Claudius will die by drinking the cup. Then Claudius dies choking on a chicken bone at lunch. Then the Queen dies when Horatio shows her the magical Mirror of Death. This mirror appears in no previous scene, nor is it explained why it exists. Then Ophelia summons up the Ghost from Act One and kills it, while she makes a speech denouncing the evils of religion. Ophelia and Hamlet are parted, as it is revealed in the last act that a curse will befall them if they do not part ways.
— John C. Wright, Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth
Here we are in the century of information, that is to say the unformed. Every kind of literature will be journalistic, with a science for ballast.
— Julien Torma
The principle of art is to pause, not bypass. The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke. This requires a moment of pause--a contract with yourself through the object you look at or the page you read. In that moment of pause, I think life expands. And really the purpose of art--for me, of fiction--is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have. That is the moment of finding something which you have not known about yourself, or your environment, about others and about life.
— Jerzy Kosiński
One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one's favourite writers. It gave one a curious feeling
—  it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one's dressing gown.
I think that the thematic, formal history of the literary form ultimately harkens back to a different political system. That is to say, a feudal order: the aristocratic dispensation of leisure time, the refinements of the self. With the shift from feudal aristocracy to democracy there has been a long process of evolution. I think we’re in the throes of a kind of steep, logarithmic shift, and I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.
— Ayad Akhtar
A page of a book is like a human face. Look at a page by Hemingway and compare it with Sterne and Marcel Proust. They are different typographical beings. But force upon them those ragged edges, and the influence of the author’s style on the physical aspect of the page, their typographical physiognomy will disappear. No, unjustified setting is a sort of gleichschaltung [enforced conformity] through diversity, a very phoney diversity. Produced methodically by chance. For the comfort of the keyboard, and not for the comfort of the eye.
— Stefan Themerson
Oh? And what's so stinking about it?.
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us. Part of what we always did was have sex and fight about it and break each other’s hearts. I guess there’s other kinds of love too. Great friendships. Working together. But poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling. Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You’re always home.
— Eileen Myles
People don’t read to enlighten themselves or seek to gain some valuable insight into their own psychology. People read to escape.
— Dermot Davis, Brain: The Man Who Wrote the Book That Changed the World
By their very nature, idiots do not have the intellectual capacity to identify genius. All that idiots are mentally equipped to recognize are other idiots.
— Dermot Davis, Brain: The Man Who Wrote the Book That Changed the World
O, great wise man,' she said, 'I have been wondering so many things. Is life more than sitting at home doing the same thing over and over? Wise man, is life more than watching one's relatives do unpleasant things, or more than grim tasks one must perform at school and at work? Is life more than being entertained by literature, wise man, or more than traveling from one place to another, suffering from poor emotional health and pondering the people one loves? And what about those who lead a life of mystery? And the mysteries of life? And, wise man, what about the overall feeling of doom that one cannot ever escape no matter what one does, and miscellaneous things that I have neglected to mention in specific?
— Lemony Snicket, Horseradish
My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger" - Billy Connolly
— Sherry Marie Gallagher, Boulder Blues: A Tale of the Colorado Counterculture
Truth that is naked is the most beautiful.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne's vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn't care about masterpieces, or even good paintings... but about what is beyond all painting, all art.
— Zbigniew Herbert, The Collected Prose, 1948-1998
As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.
— William H. Gass, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation
Oh literature is a wonderful thing, Varenka, a very wonderful thing: I discovered that from being with those people the day before yesterday. It is a profound thing. It strengthens people’s hearts and instructs them,… Literature is a picture, or rather in a certain sense both a picture and a mirror; it is an expression of emotion, a subtle form of criticism, a didactic lesson and a document…
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Poor Folk
Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn't sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality.
— Zbigniew Herbert, The Collected Prose, 1948-1998
Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say a shocking, realization. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all-comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have truly wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the harsh air’s damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet.
— John Banville, The Sea
Literature is the question without the answer. Philosophy is the answer without the question.
— Chloe Thurlow
Every child deserves to be a boat cast out in a sea of books.
— K. Lamb
Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down.
— Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
We obtained literature by our own efforts, it is a product of our own life, and that is why we love it so much and hold it so dear, why we pin our hopes on it.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Anything could happen in the company of a woman whose usual status is ‘apparition’.
— Margot McCuaig, The Birds That Never Flew
Banks watched the sun creep over the forest of oak trees and a crack of light broke through the night and grew longer and wider and ate the black like a fungus until the darkness was gone and there was light and it was day.
— Matthew McBride, A Swollen Red Sun
My words, my writing, my actions—these have never been for myself alone, either directly or indirectly. There is no such thing as an artist who creates art only for himself. That is masturbation.
— Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Mute's Soliloquy: a Memoir
There are some people about whom it is difficult to say anything which would describe them immediately and fully in their most typical and characteristic aspects; these are the people who are usually called "ordinary" and accounted as "the majority," and who actually do make up the great majority of society. In their novels and stories writers most often try to choose and present vividly and artistically social types which are extremely seldom encountered in real life, and which are nevertheless more real than real life itself. Podkolyosin, viewed as a type, in perhaps exaggerated, but he is hardly unknown. How many clever people having learned from Gogol about Podkolyosin at once discover that great numbers of their friends bear a terrific resemblance to Podkolyosin. They knew before Gogol that their friends were like Podkolyosin, except they did not know yet that that was their name...Nevertheless the question remains before us: what is the novelist to do with the absolutely "ordinary" people, and how can he present them to readers so that they are at all interesting? To leave them out of a story completely is not possible, because ordinary people are at every moment, by and large, the necessary links in the chain of human affairs; leaving them out, therefore, means to destroy credibility. To fill a novel entirely with types or, simply for the sake of interest, strange and unheard-of people, would be improbable and most likely not even interesting. In our opinion the writer must try to find interesting and informative touches even among commonplace people. When, for example, the very nature of certain ordinary persons consists precisely of their perpetual and unvarying ordinariness, or, better still, when in spite of their most strenuous efforts to life themselves out of the rut of ordinariness and routine, then such persons acquire a certain character of their own-the typical character of mediocrity which refuses to remain what it is and desires at all costs to become original and independent, without having the slightest capacity for independence.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We have the power to shape our lives, by the way we think. Only that to have a progressive life, we must train ourselves into thinking in a certain way.
— Ndiritu Wahome
… I don't know what to say.'‘That’s okay. Sometimes talking is like singing in a storm.’‘Like when you’re scared?’‘Exactly.’‘Or when you’re sad?’‘That too. A voice can be reassuring.
— Élise Turcotte, Guyana
Though it's true that (dictionary-maker Samuel) Johnson sometimes seem to feel that the language was in decline, he didn't rail against it with (Jonathan) Swift's anger. Instead, he hoped the example of his dictionary would temper that change by providing a distinguished literary example
— Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity
Where are they, the American fiction writers whose works are interested in the question “What do these people have to do with us?” and “What are we doing out there in the world?
— Kamila Shamsie
Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words - the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both good story and good words, treasure that book.
— Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis
What is hell to a writer? Hell is being too busy to find the time to write or being unable to find the inspiration. Hell is suddenly finding the words but being away from your notebook or typewriter. Hell is when the verses slip away through your fingers and they never return again.
— R.M. Engelhardt (TALON), The Resurrection Waltz Poems R.M. Engelhardt
Books are a staircase to unknown worlds.
— Jason Ellis
Many of the greatest books are like a forest. “The best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost.
— Anthony M. Esolen
Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books." (p. 5)
— Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
A month later the law student leaves you for one of her classmates, tells you that it was great but she has to start being realistic. . . . .Later you see her with said classmate on the Yard. He's even lighter than you but he still looks unquestionably black. He's also like nine feet tall and put together like an anatomy primer. They are walking hand in hand and she looks so very happy that you try to find the space in your heart not to begrudge her.
— Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her
The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in a way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class.
— John  Williams, Stoner
I find it sad that more Christian literature does not address miracles, and the possibility of demons in our midst. Jesus performed countless miracles in his life that were clearly discussed in the New Testament. And, he cast out demons. Why do some Christians act as those the potential for miracles died with Him? Why do people believe in angels, but not demons? Both were evident in the Bible.
— D.L. Koontz, Crossing Into The Mystic
I can't bear literary snobbery.
— Sara Sheridan
But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before.
— John  Williams, Stoner
Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the eyes above the cant of the ‘language of Shakespeare’... sufficiently to realise the magnitude of the loss to humanity that the world-dominance of any one language now spoken would entail: no language has ever possessed but a small fraction of the varied excellences of human speech, and each language represents a different vision of life ...
— J.R.R. Tolkien
Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it - because they're afraid of it. They're afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. "Oh those awful Orcs," they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they'll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they'll have to redefine what literature is. And they're too damned lazy to do it.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks & Essays on the Writer, the Reader & the Imagination
We are all one. Everything is meaningless, and yet at the same time meaningful. Everything matters and doesn’t matter just as much," Wisdom said and looked beyond time.(Nakoma, by Gala.J)
— Gala.J, Nakoma, a spirit's destiny
When you write a story, don't just write it - live it;When putting words into the mouth of a protagonist (or any character) imagine yourself saying them and while writing about the reaction of the listener, write it the way you would react.Let the conversations not be meant merely to be read but felt as well.If you do not feel what you write; how can you expect the readers to feel it?
— Arti Honrao
Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.
— Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
Crammed among the stacks of books in his room, the author treated literature as if each book were a window in a city of unstable skyscrapers, and he was the window-washer tasked with the impossible job of cleaning them all.” - from “Pageturner” in “365 Tomorrows
— Joseph Patrick Pascale
…This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events, only experience will answer.
— Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir
Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.
— Sara Sheridan
Perhaps the truth is that heavy literature blooms in extremes of temperature.
— Roy Blount Jr., Where Books Fall Open: A Reader's Anthology of Wit & Passion
A book can open the mind, free the heart, and speak to the soul.
— Jason Ellis
A group of ten prisoners from Dachau, I was with them, we hid in the forest to wait for the Americans. The Germans had already left everything behind. We had food but no weapons. For days we could hear bombs exploding around us. We just wanted to survive long enough for the Americans to control the territory. We didn’t want to die. At that point, our prison uniforms were the only things to keep us from being shot on the spot by the Americans. That was all we had. Who would the Americans believe? Real prisoners or guards dressed as prisoners? Those devils might even say we were the Germans. This was our nightmare.
— Sergio Troncoso, The Nature of Truth
Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature.
— Sara Sheridan
Annant is Pickwick paperless, the hunter of wisdom and due to Lovelace heart, a budding poet-ass.
— Aporva Kala, Life... Love... Kumbh...
AND where did the books go when the world turned against them? When the flames of wrath blackened their pages and erased the words, they fled to find solace and redemption in the dark places of the world.“They were exiled into darkness so their own light might one day return to illuminate the world. They went underground, literally and metaphorically, so that their haven became the hidden places far beneath the feet of their persecutors.“Thus was born the Incunabula: it was forged by fire and persecution, to preserve and protect until the book might rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of demise.
— Mark Cantrell, Silas Morlock
Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.
— Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas
The true elitists in the literary world are the ones who have become annoyed by literary ambition in any form, who have converted the very meaning of ambition so totally that it now registers as an act of disdain, a hostility to the poor common reader, who should never be asked to do anything that might lead to a pulled muscle. (What a relief to be told there's no need to bother with a book that might seem thorny, or abstract, or unusual.) The elitists are the ones who become angry when it is suggested to them that a book with low sales might actually deserve a prize (...) and readers were assured that the low sales figures for some of the titles could only mean that the books had failed our culture's single meaningful literary test.
— Ben Marcus
It was wonderful flirting with him, all the razor-edged literary banter, like Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. A battle of wit, and a test, too.
— Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity
One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Hardy and I were talking about Einstein. Hardy had met him several times, and I had recently returned from visiting him. Hardy was saying that in his lifetime there had only been two men in the world, in all the fields of human achievement, science, literature, politics, anything you like, who qualified for the Bradman class. For those not familiar with cricket, or with Hardy's personal idiom, I ought to mention that “the Bradman class” denoted the highest kind of excellence: it would include Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Newton, Archimedes, and maybe a dozen others. Well, said Hardy, there had only been two additions in his lifetime. One was Lenin and the other Einstein.
— C.P. Snow, Variety of Men
If you could forget mortality... You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras.
— Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Her gaze dims as her nostalgia for Palermo overcomes her. Those smells of seaweed dried by the sun, of capers, of ripe figs, she will never find them anywhere else; those burnt and scented shores, those waves slowly breaking, jasmine petals flaking in the sun.
— Dacia Maraini, The Silent Duchess
The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.—Steinbeck Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
— John Steinbeck
When your share your story with someone, it becomes their story too.
— Marty Rubin
The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.
— Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books
Ocean waves gently rock the boat,As if to the tune of a lullaby.She sits still as the boat silently floatsUnder the infinite blue sky.
— Rachel Lewis, Alone Upon the Sea
Modern civilization depends on science … James Smithson was well aware that knowledge should not be viewed as existing in isolated parts, but as a whole, each portion of which throws light on all the other, and that the tendency of all is to improve the human mind, and give it new sources of power and enjoyment … narrow minds think nothing of importance but their own favorite pursuit, but liberal views exclude no branch of science or literature, for they all contribute to sweeten, to adorn, and to embellish life … science is the pursuit above all which impresses us with the capacity of man for intellectual and moral progress and awakens the human intellect to aspiration for a higher condition of humanity.[Joseph Henry was the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, named after its benefactor, James Smithson.]
— Joseph Henry
There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be.
— Alain de Botton
What is needed is the imagination of the poet and the reasoning power of the mathematician. The thief of "The Purloined Letter" successfully hides the letter from the police because he is both a poet and a mathematician. Dupin is able to find it because he too meets both conditions.
— Vincent Buranelli, Edgar Allan Poe
Not writing is never an option. This is not words of advice. It's just literally never an option!
— Lillian R. Melendez
Thee, my serenity, one can not bear, Seeing thee befuddled, bereaved,Dimmed like the midnight, secluded, darkened,Thee, my serenity,A window to my eyes, A window to laughter, and peace of mind,Thee, my serenity, one can not bear,Seeing thee wail, whine, cry,Like a gloomy, mourning brume,Thee, my serenity,Soared through fervor and delight,To the crown of heavens, the Almighty Myth,One can not bear, Seeing thee prostrate, razed, demure,Upon the dimmed streets, crawling, for a sight of the lune,Thee, my birdy in love, What befall to thy song, The very chant of my life, Cut short, stopped, along with all I gasp,Thee, my serenity, one can not bear,Seeing thee, caged in thy own night, Encumbered, through thy own heart,Lean on my shoulders now,My beautiful, wonderful Lily,That thee shall not fear, the sorrow of,Of being lonely, apart, not having a peer,As I promise, to my most dear,The girl to my heart, always near,Come what may, don’t age a year,That I will be, forever here,
— Hamidreza Bagheri
The literature [Nobel] laureate of this year has said that an author can do anything as long as his readers believe him.A scientist cannot do anything that is not checked and rechecked by scientists of this network before it is accepted.
— Sune Bergström
In a sense, Joyce was Beckett's Don Quixote, and Beckett was his Sancho Panza. Joyce aspired to the One; Beckett encapsulated the fragmented many. But as each author accomplished his task, it was in the service of the other. Ultimately, Beckett's landscapes would resound with articulate silence, and his empty spaces would collect within themselves the richness of multiple shadows--a physicist would say the negative particles--of all that exists in absence, as in the white patches of an Abstract Expressionist painting. Becket would evoke, on his canvasses of vast innuendo and through the interstices of conscious and unconscious thought, the richness that Joyce had made explicit in words and intricate structure.
— Lois Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906-1946
When Mats came in the evenings, they would drink tea in the kitchen while reading their books and talking about them. If Katri came in, they were quiet and waited for her to leave. The back door would close, and Katri would have gone.“Does your sister read our books?” Anna wanted to know.“No. She reads literature.
— Tove Jansson, The True Deceiver
Crammed among the stacks of books in his room, the author treated literature as if each book were a window in a city of unstable skyscrapers, and he was the window-washer tasked with the impossible job of cleaning them all. - From "Pageturner" in 365 Tomorrows
— Joseph Patrick Pascale
A fortress built long ago,Walls made timeless by historic glory.The small girl in the boat slows,To listen to its story.
— Rachel Lewis
I have always lusted after a sepia-toned library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a sliding ladder. I fantasie about Tennessee Williams' types of evenings involving rum on the porch. I long for balmy slightly sleepless nights with nothing but the whoosh of a wooden ceiling fan to keep me company, and the joy of finding the cool spot on the bed. I would while away my days jotting down my thoughts in a battered leather-bound notebook, which would have been given to me by some former lover. My scribbling would form the basis of a best-selling novel, which they wold discuss in tiny independent bookshops on quaint little streets in forgotten corners of terribly romantic European cities. In other words, I fantasize about being credible, in that artistic, slightly bohemian way that only girls with very long legs can get away with.
— Amy Mowafi, Fe-mail 2
As night falls silently all around,She carefully turns the last page.
— Rachel Lewis, Alone Upon the Sea
I don't believe in writer's block. Who can function working seven days a week at job. It's the same with writing. Take a break and let the words come to you. It rarely comes if you force it and if it does, you'll probably regret what you wrote down on paper.
— Lillian R. Melendez
I don't believe in writer's block. Who can function working seven days a week at at job. It's the same with writing. Take a break and let the words come to you. It rarely comes if you force it and if it does, you'll probably regret what you wrote down on paper.
— Lillian R. Melendez
Writers more interested in literature than the truth ensure that they never come out with either thing — one reason that the word literature today sounds so fake, as if you were to insist on saying cuisine every time you meant food. Food, as in sustenance, is more like what we have in mind.
— The editors n+1
Yet, the man never goes slow! Feted against all the odds.How? Nobody knows.Undeterred, unabated, yet uncharted he goes...
— Subhajit Ganguly, Poems of Darkness
Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature.
— Roman Payne, The Wanderess
Is it foolish to care for non-existent folk?Then, leave me to my foolishness.
— Piers Anthony, With a Tangled Skein
The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.
— Jamie L. Harding
Journey through the Power of the Rainbow represents a condensed compendium of literary efforts from a life dedicated to transforming the themes of injustice, grief, and despair that we all encounter during some unavoidable point of our existence into a sustainable life-affirming poetics of passionate creativity, empowered spiritual vision, and inspired commitment.
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
Take my books away, and I should be desperate!
— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Yet Katie held fast to the dream that perhaps there were men in the world who appreciated good women - men capable of loving a woman enough to die for her.Something had to inspire the heroes in fairy tales and books.Her Aunt Augusta always said it was only womenfolk’s eternal wish for better men that inspired such stories…but Katie liked to believe that living or, at least, once-living men inspired them.
— Marcia Lynn McClure, The Prairie Prince
I had never kissed a boy, had never even considered that I might enjoy such an unclean thing, until literature opened my eyes.
— Ellen Hopkins, Burned
Any connoisseur knows you've got to be drunk to really enjoy a good romance.
— Osamu Dazai, Blue Bamboo: Japanese Tales of Fantasy
He couldn't imagine using the word 'rewarding' about a work of art - for instance that such and such a book has given me so much, taught me so much, etc etc. - but thought solely that it enlightened him, made him see, cynically and withough false expectations, so that he felt he was alive.
— Dag Solstad, Professor Andersen's Night
I wish I’d known those words on the day I watched those German troops land, plane-load after plane-load of them—and come off ships down in the harbor! All I could think of was damn them, damn them, over and over. If I could have thought the words "the bright day is done and we are for the dark," I’d have been consoled somehow and ready to go out and contend with circumstance—instead of my heart sinking to my shoes.
— Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
to hell with literaturewe want something redblooded
— E.E. Cummings
I Don't Write Because God Gives Me A Fresh Word Everyday, I write Because of The Words He Has Already Spoken Yesterday That Changed Today.
— The Prolific Penman
The capital ... shall form a fund, the interest of which shall be distributed annually as prizes to those persons who shall have rendered humanity the best services during the past year. ... One-fifth to the person having made the most important discovery or invention in the science of physics, one-fifth to the person who has made the most eminent discovery or improvement in chemistry, one-fifth to the one having made the most important discovery with regard to physiology or medicine, one-fifth to the person who has produced the most distinguished idealistic work of literature, and one-fifth to the person who has worked the most or best for advancing the fraternization of all nations and for abolishing or diminishing the standing armies as well as for the forming or propagation of committees of peace.
— Alfred Nobel
Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language
— Anthony Burgess, A Mouthful of Air: Languages and Language, Especially English
We nurture the candle flames that show the way ahead. We are guerrillas of the word, unsung heroes breathing softly on the embers of the human mind, so that they might re-ignite the hearths around which we once found safe haven. The book is the Light and the Life.
— Mark Cantrell, Silas Morlock
My beloved isn't dazzling light, Darkness is my beloved – The reason I'm so fond of her…
— Subhajit Ganguly, Poems of Darkness
I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature’s killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that’s not the word.
— Ander Monson
Poetry, Shakespeare and opera, are like mumps and should be caught when young. In the unhappy event that there is a postponement to mature years, the results may be devastating.
— Dimitris Mita
Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks.
— Julian Barnes
Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one’s own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as if it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Within a week I walked the streets of Tel-Aviv, I wandered around Budapest and found myself admiring the Architecture of Paris. That's the power of great literature.
— Byron Ortiz
Little mouse," a voice said through the keyhole. "Don't you know the more you wriggle, the greater the cat's delight?
— Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
Maybe it was that nearly everyone else was dead and she felt a little bit dead too, but she figured that even a vampire deserved to be saved. Maybe she ought to leave him, but she wasn't going to.
— Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
He whom the gods love dies young.
— Menander, Menander: The Plays and Fragments
Keep going' she told herself, 'Don't look back.' But she looked anyways.
— Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
Be careful," Aidan called from the bed. "You don't know what he might do." "We all know what you'd do, though, don't we?
— Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
Are you sure?" Aidan asked, "Gavriel's still a vampire."  "He warned me about you and about them. He didn't have to. I'm not going to repay that by-" she hesitated, then frowned. "What did you call him?" "That's his name," Aidan sighed, "Gavriel. The other vampires, while they were tying me to the bed, they said his name."  "Oh." With a final tug she pulled the blanked free and tossed it over to 'Gavriel
— Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
I don't want to be a vampire' she told herself. But in her dreams, she kind of did.
— Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
I'm sorry,' she said to each of the dead as she unzipped and unfastened their things, 'I'm sorry Courtney. I'm sorry Marcus. I'm sorry Rachel. I'm sorry Jon. I'm sorry I'm alive and you're dead. I'm sorry I was asleep. I'm sorry I didn't save you and now I'm taking your things. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
— Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
If I could describe myself, I'd say that I am a poetic gerd. (A geek and nerd combo) I love Shakespeare and romance, but sci-fi and action have a big slice of my heart. When I meet a man who can quote some Hitchcock out of thin air, do a perfect ''Timey Whimey'' impression, play me some classic rock when I'm sad and can give a 'Gone with the Wind' kiss, I will have my soul mate.
— Melanie Kay Taylor
You said you were allowed to lose it,' some part of her reminded herself. 'Not yet, not yet.
— Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., The Sirens of Titan
Behind Tana there was the sounds of splintering wood, as though something very large had hot the door. "No," she said softly, "Oh no. No."  "Leave me," said Gavriel. ....."Shut up or I might," she told him.
— Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.
— Charles Frahman
In the dream, Tana's mother loved her more than anyone or anything. More than death.
— Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
please,Tana,please.' -lots of characters in The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
— Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.
— Dashiell Hammett
A great book allows me to leap over that wall: in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness, I feel human and unalone.
— David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
The desire for glory is no different from that instinct for preservation that is common to all creatures. It is as if we enhance our being if we can gain a place in the memory of others; it is a new life that we acquire, which becomes as precious to us as the one we received from Heaven.
— Montesquieu, Persian Letters
The main danger is that of supposing that the thing to do is get a mind on the scale of Thomas (Aquinas)’s into your head, a task of compression that will be achieved only at your head’s peril. The only safe thing to do is to find a way of getting your mind into his, wherein yours has room to expand and grow, and explore the worlds his contains.
— Denys Turner, Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait
Some have speculated that the way [Albert] Camus died made his theories on absurdity a self-fulfilling prophecy. Others would say it was the triumphant meaningful way he lived that allowed him to rise heroically above absurdity.
— Aberjhani, Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.
Dead parents are gruesome, yes, but anyone who’s anyone in children’s literature has either been orphaned or abandoned; well-adjusted kids from stable two-parent homes don’t go on hero quests.
— Lynn Messina
Literature is one kind of aesthetic politics.
— Md. Mujib Ullah
To write only according to the rules laid down by masterpieces signifies that one is not a master but a pupil.
— David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
For this decision, too, he had submitted to the overwhelming force of Sharon’s personality, whose longings and needs seemed inalienable rights, whereas Marcus’s were merely whims.
— Panio Gianopoulos, A Familiar Beast
Sleeping beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe.
— Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles