Literature Quotes

And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.

Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.

Peellaert's comic strips were the literature of intelligence, imagination and romanticism.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.

One of my rules is never explain. A writer is a lot like a magician, if you explain how the trick works then a lot of the magic turns mundane.

The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.

You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.

The best of seers is he who guesses well.

Lovers have a way of using this word "nothing" which implies exactly the opposite.

The wavering mind is but a base possession.

Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.

But learn that to die is a debt we must all pay.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it.

Death is easier than a wretched life; and better never to have born than to live and fare badly.

Four is a powerful figure in literature and physical form

What good is it to live a life that brings pains?

Literature is an inquiry into the deepest yearnings of the human spirit.

I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.

Plants and minerals are bound to predestination. The faithful is only bound to the Divine orders.

Nothing dates like hate and in literature a little of it goes a very long way.

Never was a miser a brave soul.

Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost.

The test of real literature is that it will bear repetition. We read over the same pages again and again, and always with fresh delight.

A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.

If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles, one would hardly see anybody.

I certainly don't condemn anyone who listens to audiobooks. It seems to me that any way we get good literature in our brain is worthwhile.

Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.

The pleasure we derive from doing favors is partly in the feeling it gives us that we are not altogether worthless. It is a pleasant surprise to ourselves.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

My parents were founders of the Cuban Communist Party, and I grew up extremely poor.

When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

What by a straight path cannot be reached by crooked ways is never won.

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything

There is something about that moment, when literature becomes accessible, and a door of the world opens.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

The only books that work are those which fly through the air - the ones you let happen, not make happen.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.

Feminism is a good venue for getting yourself across as much as for getting your point across.

I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.

Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.