Literature Quotes

[Hawthorne''s] pious blame is a chuckle of praise all the while.

The bow cannot always stand bent, nor can human frailty subsist without some lawful recreation.

Never try to leap from a standstill.

The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.

Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.

Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.

Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

Thus Christian humanism is as indispensable to the Christian way of life as Christian ethics and a Christian sociology.

Let philosophy resolutely aim to be as scientific as possible, but let her not forget her strong kinship with literature.

Explain to me, please, why in our literature and art so often people absolutely incompetent in this field have the final word.

Stephen King. Now I'm not crazy about him, but he's a great a writer.

If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last.

Frenchmen have an unlimited capacity for gallantry and indulge it on every occasion.

The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read.

Sir, I shall not defeat you - I shall transcend you.

It is beautiful to talk about beautiful things and even more beautiful to silently gaze at them.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

We built tall buildings, but we have not become any taller.

Life happened because I turned the pages.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

To understand possible means to understand impossible.

We hear only our own voices, still echoes returning to our emptiness.

Devil and God – two sides of the same face.

In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.

In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

Many speak the truth when they say that they despise riches, but they mean the riches possessed by others.

In the streets through which we passed, I must own the houses in general struck me as if they were dark and gloomy, and yet at the same time they also struck me as prodigiously great and majestic.

Committees have become so important nowadays that subcommittees have to be appointed to do the work.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

While you're writing, you can't concentrate nearly as well on what the speaker is saying.

Know the function of a fuse box and the appearance of a tripped circuit breaker.

All I have told is true, but it is not the whole truth.

Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.

Invest in a feather duster - the possibilities are endless.

Poetry lies at the centre of the literary experience because it is the form that most clearly asserts the specificity of literature.

All of the troubles that some people have in life is that which they married into.

Leave the rest to the gods.

An Englishman will fairly drink as much As will maintain two families of Dutch.

When a man is treated like a beast, he says, 'After all, I'm human.' When he behaves like a beast, he says 'After all, I'm only human.

There is no human bliss equal to twelve hours of work with only six hours in which to do it.

And though it is much to be a nobleman, it is more to be a gentleman.

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.

Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

I'm kind of hooked to the game of art and literature; my heroes are artists and writers.

Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.

I'm in the civil discourse business. I think it takes all kinds. And more power to everybody.