Literature Quotes

I read Russian literature a lot.

We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.

The Victorians needed parody. Without it their literature would have been a rank and weedy growth, over-watered with tears.

Fiction stretches our sensibilities and our understanding, as mere information never can.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant.

He who does without the praise of the crowd will not deny himself an opportunity to be his own adherent.

Action and reaction are equal and opposite.

Usually the modest person passes for someone reserved, the silent for a sullen person

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.

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

The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.

One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

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

The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.

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

Bad literature is a form of treason.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

A woman's health is her capital.

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but less by assimilation than by friction.

Where youth and diffidence are united, it requires uncommon steadiness of reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl in the world.

I've shut myself inside these walls, and I'm going to be a very lonely old lady if I'm not careful.

Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything.

The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.

Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.

It does not prove a thing to be right because the majority say it is so.

What's vice today may be virtue, tomorrow.

The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society

All great art and literature is propaganda.

Cynicism is intellectual treason.

How can we speak of right and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood? How can we pray to God for mercy if we ourselves have no mercy? Nobel laureate in literature.

It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.

I start writing when I overcome my disgust with literature.

Holden Caulfield is the best character in literature, period.

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.

Why do they put the Gideon Bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late...?

Where would fashion be without literature?

Literature was intended to be dangerous. Art was meant to be dangerous. Ideas were nothing if they were not dangerous.

How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?

Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.

My current goal is to place a moratorium on goals.

You could put on monkeys jumping up and down and get bigger numbers than MSNBC.

In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses-the ones who toil eighteen hours a day without tiring.

A man can become so accustomed to the thought of his own faults that he will begin to cherish them as charming little 'personal characteristics.'

Journalism students need to understand it and need a solid background in the liberal arts, in sociology, economics, literature and language, because they won't get it later on.