c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary form, and was, for a brief moment only, wide-ranging in its sociocultural influence. For the most part, it has always been an acquired taste and it asks a good deal from its audience. Our great contemporary problem is in separating that which is really serious from that which is either frivolously and fashionably "radical" and that which is a kind of literary analogy to the Letterman show. It's not that there is pop culture around, it's that so few people can see the difference between it and high culture, if you will. Morton Feldman is not Stephen Sondheim. The latter is a wonderful what-he-is, but he is not what-he-is-not. To pretend that he is is to insult Feldman and embarrass Sondheim, to enact a process of homogenization that is something like pretending that David Mamet, say, breathes the same air as Samuel Beckett. People used to understand that there is, at any given time, a handful of superb writers or painters or whatever--and then there are all the rest. Nothing wrong with that. But it now makes people very uncomfortable, very edgy, as if the very idea of a Matisse or a Charles Ives or a Thelonious Monk is an affront to the notion of "ain't everything just great!" We have the spectacle of perfectly nice, respectable, harmless writers, etc., being accorded the status of important artists...Essentially the serious novelist should do what s/he can do and simply forgo the idea of a substantial audience.
— Gilbert Sorrentino
You are my shaper and my world as well. It is done. No need to choose.
— Toni Morrison, A Mercy
...the mode by which he "heard" the universe and projected it far beyond himself. Perhaps it was in this, I said to Albertine, this unknown quality of a unique world which no other composer had ever yet revealed, that the most authentic proof of genius lies, even more than in the content of the work itself. "Even in literature?” Albertine inquired. “Even in literature.” And thinking again of the sameness of Vinteuil’s works, I explained to Albertine that the great men of letters have never created more than a single work, or rather have never done more than refract through various media an identical beauty which they bring into the world. “If it were not so late, my sweet,” I said to her, “I would show you this quality in all the writers whose works you read while I’m asleep, I would show you the same identity as in Vinteuil. These key-phrases, which you are beginning to recognise as I do, my little Albertine, the same in the sonata, in the septet, in the other works, would be, say for instance in Barbey dAurevilly, a hidden reality revealed by a physical sign, the physiological blush...
— Marcel Proust, The Captive & The Fugitive
The moon had been lighted and was hung in a treetop.
— Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
Even things in a book-case change if they are alive
—  we find ourselves wanting to meet them again
You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instrumentsproducing a confused agreeable massof sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.
— Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Read the great books, gentlemen,” Mr. Monte said one day. “Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There’s not enough time.
— Pat Conroy
Now I could appreciate the merits of a broad, poetical, powerful interpretation, or rather it was to this that those epithets were conventionally applied, but only as we give the names of Mars, Venus, Saturn to planets which have nothing mythological about them. We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the gap.
— Marcel Proust
It appeared that the swift wings of their desires would have shattered against the iron gates of the impossible.
— Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
A writer's mind is a place where demons fight angels in disguise.
— Ram Vignesh
Camp fires, like red, peculiar blossoms, dotted the night.
— Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
When it begins it is like a light in a tunnel, a rush of steel andsteam across a torn up life. It is a low rumble, an earthquake in theback of the mind. My spine is a track with cold black steel racing onit, a trail of steam and dust following behind, ghost like. It feelslike my whole life is holding its breath.By the time she leaves the room I am surprised that she can’t see thetrain. It has jumped the track of my spine and landed in my mothers’living room. A cold dark thing, black steel and redwood paneling. Itis the old type, from the western movies I loved as a kid.He throws open the doors to the outside world, to the dark ocean. Ifeel a breeze tugging at me, a slender finger of wind that catches atmy shirt. Pulling. Grabbing. I can feel the panic build in me, theneed to scream or cry rising in my throat.And then I am out the door, running, tumbling down the steps fallingout into the darkened world, falling out into the lifeless ocean. Outinto the blackness. Out among the stars and shadows.And underneath my skin, in the back of my head and down the back of myspine I can feel the desperation and I can feel the noise. I can feelthe deep and ancient ache of loudness that litters across my bones.It’s like an old lover, comfortable and well known, but unwelcome andinappropriate with her stories of our frolicking.And then she’s gone and the Conductor is closing the door. Thedarkness swells around us, enveloping us in a cocoon, pressing flatagainst the train like a storm. I wonder, what is this place?Those had been heady days, full and intense. It’s funny. I rememberthe problems, the confusions and the fears of life we all dealt with.But, that all seems to fade. It all seems to be replaced by images ofthe days when it was all just okay. We all had plans back then,patterns in which we expected the world to fit, how it was to bedeciphered.Eventually you just can’t carry yourself any longer, can’t keep youreyelids open, and can’t focus on anything but the flickering light ofthe stars. Hours pass, at first slowly like a river and then all in arush, a climax and I am home in the dorm, waking up to the ringing ofthe telephone.When she is gone the apartment is silent, empty, almost like a personsleeping, waiting to wake up. When she is gone, and I am alone, I curlup on the bed, wait for the house to eject me from its dying corpse.Crazy thoughts cross through my head, like slants of light in anattic.The Boston 395 rocks a bit, a creaking noise spilling in from theundercarriage. I have decided that whatever this place is, all thesenoises, sensations - all the train-ness of this place - is afabrication. It lulls you into a sense of security, allows you to feelas if it’s a familiar place. But whatever it is, it’s not a train, orat least not just a train.The air, heightened, tense against the glass. I can hear the squeak ofshoes on linoleum, I can hear the soft rattle of a dying man’sbreathing. Men in white uniforms, sharp pressed lines, run past,rolling gurneys down florescent hallways.
— Jason Derr, The Boston 395
A writer's mind is a place where demons kill angels in disguise.
— Ram Vignesh
The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?
— James Salter, Light Years
. . . you don’t need a happy ending to move onto a happy beginning.
— Krystal McLean, My Darrling
You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong - only because cruelty is pleasant or useful to him, In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Then said he, ’I am going to my Father’s; and though with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought His battles who now will be my rewarder.’.... So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.
— John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, Part 2: Christiana
Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.
— Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City
Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on a bus.
— Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Water, wind and birdsong were the echoes in this quiet place of a great chiming symphony that was surging around the world. Knee-deep in grasses and moon daisies, Stella stood and listened, swaying a little as the flowers and trees were swaying, her spirit voice singing loudly, though her lips were still, and every pulse in her body beating its hammer strokes in time to the song.
— Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill
Spend the glittering moonlight therePursuing down the soundless deepLimbs that gleam and shadowy hair,Or floating lazy, half-asleep.Dive and double and follow after,Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call,With lips that fade, and human laughterAnd faces individual,Well this side of Paradise! . . .There's little comfort in the wise.
— Rupert Brooke, The Collected Poems
Human existence is temporary and all the knowledge of the universe we acquire will in time be forgotten because there will be no humans left to benefit from any of the stuff we learned.And yet, this doesn't invalidate scientific exploration to me. We seek to understand the universe because it makes our lives better and more rich. Similarly, we tell stories (and think about why and how to tell stories) because it makes human existence richer. Made-up stories matter. They bring us pleasure and solace and nurture empathy by letting us see the world through others' eyes. They also help us to feel unalone, to understand that our grief and joy is shared not just by those around us but by all those who came before us and all those still yet to come.
— John Green
literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people.
— Gabriel García Márquez
It's a truth universally acknowledged...
— Jane Austen
This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man’s-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life.
— John Buchan, Best Short Stories
It hadn’t always been this way, that’s a cliché, but it is a cliché for a reason. It’s not like anyone starts a relationship with nothing to say to the other person. No-one wants to feel like a complete stranger and live together because it’s easier than trying to remember who owns the copy of Almost Famous – which was mine by the way.
— David Louden, Lost Angeles
Wriggling around, two fingers deep in my back end like some teenage boy unsure what he should be tugging at inside his girlfriend’s nether region I wrestled a fifty free.
— David Louden, Lost Angeles
Propping up a seat at the bar we devour chicken wings like life does dreams
— David Louden, Lost Angeles
With the windows in his top of the range Audi firmly in place we slowly baked ourselves and chatted over why my hatred of golf was wrong, what made a good antihero and why Paul McCartney should just fuck off.
— David Louden, Lost Angeles
I loved her
—  I didn’t know how to say it without breaking down the autobot façade she saw before her and revealing the ugly and scarred wreck that lived within my skin. So I played with the radio instead.
Go ahead and laugh at Detroit. Because you are laughing at yourself.
— Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy
The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)
— C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: Nothing. And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get my understanding from another source, I simply miss my life. Shall we tell our children that one thing is as good as another-- here a bit of knowledge of physics, and there a bit of knowledge of literature? If we do so, the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, because that normally is the time it takes from the birth of an idea to its full maturity when it fills the minds of a new generation and makes them think by it.Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live.
— Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
She's right. We would compose poems about love and tell stories that have been heard in some form before. But it would be our first time feeling and telling.
— Ally Condie, Reached
An artist is the magician put among men to gratify--capriciously--their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships--and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes--husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer...
— Tom Stoppard, Travesties
Writing, painting, singing--it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death's footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a place where you can linger without as much fear. For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey there between footsteps makes up our lives.
— Ally Condie, Reached
In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment. Whether you write well or ill, be assured that you will not escape from blame...
— Matthew      Lewis, The Monk
She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose.
— Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
The digital sunset always looks better than the real thing, always. Because a sunset generated by the basic package of yellow sun and blue sky is unreliable. Today it may be stunning, hypnotic. Tomorrow it may be lifeless and dull, a white sky scorched with yellow. Tomorrow the sky will be velvet.
— Will Christopher Baer, Hell's Half Acre
I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
People who want to change everything in the world but never think of changing themselves are clapping with one palm.
— Subhan Zein
I don't write poems to melt your heart.I write them,so our heartscan melt together.
— Subhan Zein
If you cannot be a sun that illuminates the light, be a moon that never tires of reflecting the light.
— Subhan Zein
The most advertised commodity is not always intrinsically the best; but is sometimes merely the product of a company, with plenty of money to spend on advertising.
— Emily Post
The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself.
— Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination
It is the custom on the stage in all good, murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes in as regular alternation as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon.
— Charles Dickens
Real poetry is art at its purest sense. It is never a commodity, but a breath of eternity.
— Subhan Zein
Whether or not the fame of Gilgamesh of Uruk had reached the Aegean – and the idea is attractive – there can be no doubt that it was as great as that of any other hero. In time his name became so much a household word that jokes and forgeries were fathered onto it, as in a popular fraud that survives on eighth-century B.C. tablets which perhaps themselves copy an older text. This is a letter supposed to be written by Gilgamesh to some other king, with commands that he should send improbable quantities of livestock and metals, along with gold and precious stones for an amulet for Enkidu, which would weigh no less that thirty pounds. The joke must have been well received, for it survives in four copies, all from Sultantepe.
— N.K. Sandars, The Epic of Gilgamesh
The parrot had a range of phrases. His own name ('Niko, Niko'), the name of his original owner and now 'Stavros'. Occasionally he would also say 'Panagia mou', which could be an expression of piety but also a gentle expletive, depending on how it was said. With the parrot it was hard to tell. It did not sound pious.
— Victoria Hislop, The Last Dance: And Other Stories
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, trowing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up.
— Barbara Kingsolve
Writing poetry is a state of free float
— Margaret Atwood
I write for the beauty of the printed word"from PREFACE to BIPOLAR BUFFALO
— Anthony Antek
This is what Laura loved about literature. You could see things in it that perhaps weren’t there, but might be. And even that didn’t matter if, in the end, readers needed something to be there. They could bring their somethings to a text, as co-creators, embedding a needed reality in the story that, if it was flexible enough, would allow new threads to take their place beside the author’s.
— L.L. Barkat, The Novelist
Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.
— Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her
The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.
— C.S. Lewis
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.
— Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion
If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?
— E.A. Bucchianeri
It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own. You may not appreciate them at first. You may pine for your novel of crude and unadulterated adventure. You may, and will, give it the preference when you can. But the dull days come, and the rainy days come, and always you are driven to fill up the chinks of your reading with the worthy books which wait so patiently for your notice. And then suddenly, on a day which marks an epoch in your life, you understand the difference. You see, like a flash, how the one stands for nothing, and the other for literature. From that day onwards you may return to your crudities, but at least you do so with some standard of comparison in your mind. You can never be the same as you were before. Then gradually the good thing becomes more dear to you; it builds itself up with your growing mind; it becomes a part of your better self, and so, at last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers and love them for all that they have meant in the past.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, Through The Magic Door
What is literature, and why do I try to write about it? I don’t know. Likewise, I don’t know why I go on living, most of the time. But this not knowing is precisely what I want to preserve. As readers, the closest way we can engage with a literary work is to protect its indeterminacy; to return ourselves and it to a place that precludes complete recognition. Really, when I’m reading, all I want is to stand amazed in front of an unknown object at odds with the world.
— M. John Harrison
I've always felt that the performance of a raag resembles a novel - or at least the kind of novel I'm attempting to write. You know,' he continued, extemporizing as he went along, 'first you take one note and explore it for a while, then another to discover its possibilities, then perhaps you get to the dominant, and pause for a bit, and it's only gradually that the phrases begin to form and the tabla joins in with the beat...and then the more brilliant improvisations and diversions begin, with the main theme returning from time to time, and finally it all speeds up, and the excitement increases to a climax.
— Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
Amazing, really, to think of what a man could achieve with the simple ability to put pen to paper and spin a decent yarn.
— Graham Moore, The Sherlockian
One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love.
— Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life
Elgin himself looked ten years younger, now that he’d cast the die, but I thought exuberance had got the better of him when he strode into the saloon later, threw The Origin of Species on the table and announced:"It’s very original, no doubt, but not for a hot evening. What I need is some trollop."I couldn’t believe my ears, and him a church-goer, too. "Well, my lord, I dunno,” says I. "Tientsin ain’t much of a place, but I’ll see what I can drum up —""Michel’s been reading Doctor Thorne since Taku," cried he. "He must have finished it by now, surely! Ask him, Flashman, will you?" So I did, and had my ignorance, enlightened.
— George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman and the Dragon
It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble.
— Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life
Watson is a cheap, efficient little sod of a literary device. Holmes doesn't need him to solve crimes any more than he needs a ten-stone ankle weight. The audience, Arthur. The audience needs Watson as an intermediary, so that Holmes's thoughts might be forever kept just out of reach. If you told stories from Holmes's perspective, everyone would know what the bleeding genius was thinking the whole time. They'd have the culprit fingered on page one.
— Graham Moore, The Sherlockian
Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality.
— Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked
Sometimes, in the course of my hopeless quest, I would pick up and dip into one of the ordinary books that lay strewn around the castle. Whenever I did, it seemed so insipid and insubstantial that I flew into a rage and hurled it at the wall after reading the first few sentences. I was spoilt for any other form of literature, and the mental torment I endured was comparable to the agony of unrequited love compounded by the withdrawal symptoms associated with a severe addiction.
— Walter Moers, The City of Dreaming Books
That was always my fear, that perhaps books would lead me astray, teaching me about a life that didn’t match reality.
— Stefanos Livos, A Life In A Moment
Every kingdom has three pillars: Poet, Sword and Law.
— Lara Biyuts
Had Stella been named anything else, and/or had we lived in any other city besides New Orleans, my desperate call would have been just my desperate call. In that alternate universe the neighbors might have peeked from behind the curtains but they wouldn't have laughed or, worse, joined in. But you simply cannot shout the name Stella while standing under a window in New Orleans and hope for anything like an authentic or even mildly earnest moment. Literature had beaten me to this moment, had staked its flag here first, and there was nothing I could do outside in that soupy, rain-drenched alleyway that could rise above sad parody. Perhaps if she'd been named Beatrice, or Katarzyna-maybe then my life would have turned out differently. Maybe then my voice would have roused her to the window, maybe then I could have told her that I was sorry, that I could be a better man, that I couldn't promise I knew everything it meant but I loved her. Instead I stared up at that black window, shutmouthed and impotent, blinking and reblinking my eyes to flush out the rainwater. "Stella," I whispered. The French have an expression: "Without literature life is hell." Yeah, well. Life with it bears its own set of flames.
— Jonathan Miles, Dear American Airlines
Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
And adab towards language means the recognition and acknowledgement of the rightful and proper place of every word in a written or uttered sentence so as not to produce a dissonance in meaning, sound and concept. Literature is called adabiyat in Islam precisely because it is seen as the keeper of civilization, the collector of teachings and statements that educate the self and society with adab such that both are elevated to the rank of the cultured man (insan adabi) and society.
— Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud, Knowledge, Language, Thought and The Civilization of Islam: Essays in Honor of Syed Muhammad Naquib al–Attas
If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to-- Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"They had reached the end of the gallery, and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room.
— Jane Austen
I was beginning to understand something I couldn't articulate. It was a jazzy feeling in my chest, a fluttering, a kind of buzzing in my brain. Warmth. Life. The circulation of blood. Sanguinity. I don't know. I understood the enormous risk of telling the truth, how the telling could result in every level of hell reigning down on you, your skin scorched to the bone and then bone to ash and then nothing but a lingering odour of shame and decomposition, but now I was also beginning to understand the new and alien feeling of taking the risk and having the person on the other end of the telling, the listener, say: Bad shit at home? You guys are running away? Yeah, I said. I understand, said, Noehmi.
— Miriam Toews, Irma Voth
She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything
— Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked
Irma, she said. But I had started to walk away. I heard her say some more things but by then I had yanked my skirt up and was running down the road away from her and begging the wind to obliterate her voice. She wanted to live with me. She missed me. She wanted me to come back home. She wanted to run away. She was yelling all this stuff and I wanted so badly for her to shut up. She was quiet for a second and I stopped running and turned around once to look at her. She was a thimble-sized girl on the road, a speck of a living thing. Her white-blond hair flew around her head like a small fire and it was all I could see because everything else about her blended in with the countryside. He offered you a what? she yelled. An espresso! I yelled back. It was like yelling at a shorting wire or a burning bush. What is it? she said. Coffee! I yelled. Irma, can I come and live--I turned around again and began to run.
— Miriam Toews, Irma Voth
While gazing at myself from yourself, I was beautiful.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
He will understand when it is too late that it is easier to love.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.
— Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising
Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I’ve no regrets.
— Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless.
— Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist
What you gain here, you lose on the other side.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
Long ago we conquered our passions looking at ourselves in the mirror of eternity.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
It can also be useful to politics, enabling that science to discover how much of it is no more than verbal construction, myth, literary tops. Politics, like literature, must above all know itself and distrust itself. As a final observation, I should like to add that it is impossible today for anyone to feel innocent, if in whatever we do or say we can discover a hidden motive - that of a white man, or a male, or the possessor of a certain income, or a member of a given economic system, or a sufferer from a certain neurosis - this should not induce in us either a universal sense of guilt or an attitude of universal accusation. When we become aware of our disease or of our hidden motives, we have already begun to get the better of them. What matters is the way in which we accept our motives and live through the ensuing crisis. This is the only chance we have of becoming different from the way we are - that is, the only way of starting to invent a new way of being.
— Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature
In greatness, life and death merge.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
From one bell all the bells toll.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
Long ago an uncalled rain fell and a called-upon God stayed equally distant.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds.
— Don DeLillo, Americana
If you have a big heart, you will live a large life.
— Yvonne Jayne
I gather," he added, "that you've never had much time to study the classics?""That is so.""Pity. Pity. You've missed a lot. Everyone should be made to study the classics, if I had my way."Poirot shrugged his shou
— Agatha Christie, The Labours of Hercules
They are both spectacular, Life and death.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
Poirot, watching him, felt suddenly a doubt--an uncomfortable twinge. Was there, here, something that he had missed? Some richness of the spirit? Sadness crept over him. Yes, he should have become acquainted with the classics. Long ago. Now, alas, it was too late....
— Agatha Christie, The Labours of Hercules
The man is in his work,read it if you want to know about him.
— R.M. Engelhardt (TALON), The Last Cigarette: The Collected Poems Of R.M. Engelhardt 1989-2006
It's a special form of scholarly neurosis,´ said Camel. `He's no longer able to distinguish between life and literature.´
— David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down
Literary style is like crystal-ware: the cleaner the wineglass, the brighter the brilliance. As a reader, I agree with those who believe that a colour of the dress, which a character has on, as well as any enumeration and description of dishes at dinner or in the kitchen should be mentioned only in case if all this has a strong consequent relation to the plot, but as an author, I can’t help mentioning all this, with no particular reason, just for love for my characters, desiring to give them something nice and pleasant. Melancholy grows a platinum rose. Affection grows a double rose.
— Lara Biyuts
The castle? The monster? The man of learning? I only just thought of it. Surely you know that just as the momentous events of the past cast their shadows down the ages, so now, when the sun is drawing toward the dark,our own shadows race into the past to trouble mankind's dreams.
— Gene Wolfe
The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine.
— Ian McEwan, Black Dogs
One hand I extend into myself, the other toward others.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
I travel, always arriving in the same place.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
My mathematics is simple: one plus one = one.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
We will go far away, to nowhere, to conquer, to fertilize until we become tired. Then we will stop and there will be our home.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Through everything I have passed but nowhere I have been.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
All dust is the same dust. Temporarily separated To go peacefully And enjoy the eternal nap.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
And this that you call solitude is in fact a big crowd.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
Life eats life to live.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
Mathematics doesn’t care about those beyond the numbers.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
With me: one minus one = one
—  with you: it’s zero. Here lies the only difference.
Neither alive nor dead; No one lets up, No one wins.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
He awaits himself while walking, out of the icy circle to escape.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
Instead of imitating me, you simply loiter.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
To jump over centuries In one step is impossible. Jump too high or far, You’ll be way too late.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
In the end, the world returns to a grain.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
Death swallows death.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
Vandals listen only when others are stronger.If vandals are equal or strongerTheir word is the last word.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
In the biggest and the smallest I sleep but at the same place I stay.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
Every star was once darker than the night, before it awoke.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sign and Its Children
You are not what you are
—  You are darkness Looking for light within.
If emptiness is empty, how can something be borne or awaken from it?
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sign and Its Children
Nothing is part of everything.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sign and Its Children
What does infinity mean to you? Are you not infinity and yourself?
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
Will the day tell its secret Before it disappears, Becomes timeless night.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
From what you didn’t say, lies that you did say.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Creator
I can see myself before myself—A being through dark scenery.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
The farther away, the closer the home becomes.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
There is nobody to wake up eternal seekers.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
If emptiness is endless, then everything rests in emptiness.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sign and Its Children
When everything hurries everywhere, nothing goes anywhere.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sign and Its Children
You are hurrying to the sweet place, To the nonsense chasing your spirit And in the nonsense you look for answers.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
There are no clear borders, Only merging invisible to the sight.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
The eyesight for an eagle is what thought is to a man.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Creator
From everything, nothing looks to nothing.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sign and Its Children
Digressions are part of harmony, deviations too.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sign and Its Children
There is a pledge of the big and of the small in the infinite.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
Without nothing, everything would be nothing.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sign and Its Children
From nothing comes everything.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sign and Its Children
Earth is the source of light.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sign and Its Children
With your goal you make the one.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Creator
Although personal calling I sense,Who am I? even if I am, I don't know.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
When within yourself you find the road, the right road will open.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Creator
To leave out beautiful sunsets is the secret of good taste.
— Dejan Stojanovic
To keep the air fresh among words is the secret of verbal cleanliness.
— Dejan Stojanovic
In every sound, the hidden silence sleeps.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Creator
To say more while saying less is the secret of being simple.
— Dejan Stojanovic
To expect to be kissed having bad breath is the secret of a fool.
— Dejan Stojanovic
No reason for a feverish rush For we will all arrive in the same place At the right time. Justice will be served. There will be no better or worse, No big and small, no rewards, no punishment, No guilt, no judges, no hierarchies; Only silent equality.
— Dejan Stojanovic
When I want to be reminded of stupidity, especially my own, I turn on the TV.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Based on the law of probability Everything is possible because The sheer existence of possibility Confirms the existence Of impossibility.
— Dejan Stojanovic
To cut and tighten sentences is the secret of mastery.
— Dejan Stojanovic
In an endless silence even screams sound silent.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Creator
To understand possible means to understand impossible.
— Dejan Stojanovic
To not say all that can be said is the secret of discipline and economy.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Unjustified ambition kills value,Kills someone else's desire to fly, Cuts their wings, sucks their air.If there is nothing else, it eats its own life.
— Dejan Stojanovic
A star needs a star.
— Dejan Stojanovic
To go against the grain is the secret of bravery.
— Dejan Stojanovic
We traveled long and forgot why poetry was invented.
— Dejan Stojanovic
To go where no one else has ever gone before is the secret of heroism.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Those who hate rain hate life.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Nothing reminds us of an awakening more than rain.
— Dejan Stojanovic
When all is lost, there is still a memory.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Possible is more a matter of attitude, A matter of decision, to choose Among the impossible possibilities, When one sound opportunity Becomes a possible solution.
— Dejan Stojanovic
If you are only what you are, You at least have a chance Not to outsmart, But be on a par with yourself And that is worth trying.
— Dejan Stojanovic
To accomplish the perfect perfection, a little imperfection helps.
— Dejan Stojanovic
I fly through memory to find a newborn love.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Why poetry, you ask? Because of life, I answer.
— Dejan Stojanovic
There is always the question why And there is always life, Which doesn't need an answer.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Oblivion cures the old wounds.
— Dejan Stojanovic
To dream on occasion is not dreaming, To love on occasion is not love.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Senses empower limitations, senses expand vision within borders, senses promote understanding through pleasure.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Great poets are great copy editors.
— Dejan Stojanovic
When there is noise and crowds, there is trouble; When everything is silent and perfect, There is just perfection and nothing To fill the air.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Possible impossibility emerges From an impossible possibility, Or possibly, impossible possibility Blooms from the impossibly possible impossibility.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Everything seems impossible And everything seems possible.
— Dejan Stojanovic
The Booker thing was a catalyst for me in a bizarre way. It’s perceived as an accolade to be published as a ‘literary’ writer, but, actually, it’s pompous and it’s fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself. I’d always read omnivorously and often thought much literary fiction is read by young men and women in their 20s, as substitutes for experience.
— Neil Cross
Without pleasure there is no sight or measure.
— Dejan Stojanovic
There is no born lover, There is no born Don Juan, For we are all lovers.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Too often, feelings arrive too soon, waiting for thoughts that often come too late.
— Dejan Stojanovic
He tries to find the exit from himself but there is no door.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Tell me something only you know and make a new friend.
— Dejan Stojanovic
There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata
—  there is a thunder note in an angry sky.
Before the first before and after the last after, there is night waiting.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Trying too hard to be too good, even when trying to be bad, is too good for the bad, too bad for the good.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Even great men bow before the Sun
—  it melts hubris into humility.
Love is almost never simple.
— Dejan Stojanovic
A word into the silence thrown always finds its echo somewhere where silence opens hidden lexicons.
— Dejan Stojanovic
They will smile, as they always do when they plan a major attack late in the night.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Is that all?
— Dejan Stojanovic
Although all days are equally long regardless of the season, some days are long not only seasonally but by rewards they offer.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Our desire to say more grows bigger and what to say about it, except that saying is not always about saying, growing is not always about growing.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Nobility is not only in forgiveness.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Forget decorated generals, tell me about Private Ryan.
— Dejan Stojanovic
There are countless circles of hell
—  believers never penetrate the ninth circle.
For a moment at least, be a smile on someone else’s face.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Strangers are endearing because you don’t know them yet.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
They blossomed, they did not talk about blossoming.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
There are no winners in real games.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
There are many secrets
—  don’t try to resolve them all.
Don’t pay attention to those who offer too much.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
It is easy to see the glow but hard to recognize the awakening of silence.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
The game itself is bigger than the winning.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
If you are good, they say you are weak.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Beyond all vanities, fights, and desires, omnipotent silence lies.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
If what we think of ourselves were true, the planet would overflow with geniuses.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
The light teaches you to convert life into a festive promenade.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Christ did not ask or want to be what he was not.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Disease often comes with a smiling face.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
All those big words produce disgust today.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Statesmen are grocers, ambitious clowns.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Your head is a lit chamber.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
He confided his deepest secret to you
—  be always wary of his secret.
Either you will be you or you will not be at all.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Whatever others may say, they say it to deceive and comfort themselves, not help you.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
A breeze, a forgotten summer, a smile, all can fit into a storefront window.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
We hear only our own voices, still echoes returning to our emptiness.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
The deeper thought is, the taller it becomes.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Either all lights are turned off or one inner light is missing.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
How many unuttered words died in the heads of those for whom a word was too expensive.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
We forget old stories, but those stories remain the same.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Do not look too far for you will see nothing.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Everybody talks, but there is no conversation.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
In the lie of truth lies the truth.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun