Literature Quotes

Love, it is said, is blind, but love is not blind. It is an extra eye, which shows us what is most worthy of regard. To see the best is to see most clearly, and it is the lover's privilege.

Strangers are endearing because you don’t know them yet.

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

Beyond all vanities, fights, and desires, omnipotent silence lies.

Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?

Those expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in the family.

Human beings have their great chance in the novel.

From whichever side I start, I think I am in an old place where others have been before me.

Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly.

Either you will be you or you will not be at all.

A hidden spark of the dream sleeps In the forest and waits In the celestial spheres of the brain.

A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.

The deeper thought is, the taller it becomes.

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.

Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.

The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.

Two of my three siblings are older, so I suppose I learned from them and became a very avid reader at a young age, which I think enough cannot be said for what you can discover through literature.

Life is only a flicker of melted ice.

Few are there that will leave the secure seclusion of the scholar's life, the peaceful walks of literature and learning, to stand out a target for the criticism of unkind and hostile minds.

There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.

If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.

Creating means living.

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

Do not look too far for you will see nothing.

For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.

We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit.

It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.

The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values.

Wine has lit up for me the pages of literature, and revealed in life romance lurking in the commonplace.

Do not gain basely; base gain is equal to ruin.

Taste is to literature what bon ton is in society.

One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.

You can plan to be brave - it's even better if you just try to be brave.

Beckett had an unerring light on things, which I much appreciated.

When I read it ["Tough Guys Don't Dance"], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

I hate brandy...it stinks of modern literature.

As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue.

Literature is both my joy and my comfort: it can add to every happiness and there is no sorrow it cannot console.