Literature Quotes

One of the major principles is that Soviet literature must be inseverably linked with the policy of the Communist party

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

Nothing that has been thought can ever be taken back

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.

As somebody who's been writing about this subject for getting on twenty years now, it's astonishing how the climate has changed in the last five years.

The '60s aren't over; they won't be over until the Fat Lady gets high.

Early Islam was a time of great creativity. Scholars excelled in sciences and literature.

And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.

Some days are like that. Even in Australia.

You can, when Time is ripe, swope to your feet - at your full height - at a single gesture. Ready to go where? Why... Wherever God motions.

A word, once sent abroad, flies irrevocably.

Human misery is too great for men to die without faith.

The Bible is still loved by millions, read by millions, and studied by millions. It remains the most published and most read book in the world of literature.

The critic does his utmost to blight genius in its infancy; that which rises in spite of him he will not see; and then he complains of the decline of literature.

We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization.

Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.

I think it is important to reach people through arts and literature, because then you establish a connection that's not an instant crisis.

Romance is the poetry of literature.

But literature, I discovered, can also save you. Truly. Over the cliché and through the truth, it can save.

In college, I had a big fixation with Southern Gothic literature. Flannery O'Connor, I read every word she's ever written.

No literature is richer than that of the sea. No story is more enthralling, no tradition is more secure.

I'm very aware of how much movies, literature and art affect culture. They are a reflection of the world around us and they are also a means by which we engage with the world around us.

The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They've always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.

The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us.

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

The literature of women's lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale.

If we reduce social life to the smallest possible unit we will find that there is no social life in the company of one.

The only pain in pleasure is the pleasure of the pain.

I assure you that the world is not so amusing as we imagined.

I enjoy the Web site a lot and I like being able to talk to my readers. I've always had a very close relationship with them.

There is nothing like becoming a mom to fill you with fear.

Well, I'm a light traveller. I chuck things away.

I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense.

Madame Bovary is myself.

Whoso will pray, he must fast and be clean, And fat his soul, and make his body lean.

Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

The same is true of ranking him thus against any work of literature. [Bob Dylan] has been made, through no fault of his own, the object of odious tokenism.

The most decisive actions of life are most often unconsidered actions.

It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.

When I went to school, they told me literature was a rope I must use to climb out of the dark well of unknowing. Writers are the knots on the rope.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.

Book reviews have never helped me. Most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time.

To hard necessity ones will and fancy must conform.

For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.

They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.