Literature Quotes · Page 53

We enjoy the great prophets of literature most when we have not yet lived enough to realize all they tell us.

— Mary Augusta Ward

To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like

— Northrop Frye

“You can never read bad literature too little, nor good literature too much.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

“The sign of a good novel is what it can cause its reader to see, even if this lies beyond the author's…

— John Gaddis

The press is the exclusive literature of the million; to them it is literature, church, and college.

— Wendell Phillips

We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Existence is the end of endless eternity without a beginning or an end.

— Dejan Stojanovic

“She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything”

— Nick Hornby

It's not a ladder we're climbing, it's literature we're producing. . . . We cannot possibly leave it to history as a…

— Nikki Giovanni

“I shouted the perfect words to scare him off. It was just the delivery (and only the delivery) that made me sound…

— Graham Parke

“Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, and a play is a novel without narration. A poem…

— Fernando Pessoa

“[Literature is] the best way of telling the truth; it’s a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth…

— Julian Barnes

“Kafka’s The Castle came to mind, a book I had not read but that fell into that category of literature that culture…

— Patrick McGuinness

“So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I associated them…

— Jorge Luis Borges

Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough…

— Walter Kirn

Creed and opinion change with time, and their symbols perish; but Literature and its temples are sacred to all creeds and inviolate.

— Mark Twain

So the most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner's mind. There is no need to have a deep understanding of…

— Shunryu Suzuki

My own view is that violence is a part of classical Haida literature - and of every mythology everywhere, so far as…

— Robert Bringhurst

Nervous states of the worst sort control me without pause. Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it. I…

— Franz Kafka

Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)—Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all…

— Walt Whitman

“From a personal experience and the examination of literature, I feel that we cannot take for granted that a dialogue, without information…

— Idries Shah

The last publicized center of American writing was Manhattan. Its writers became known as the New York Intellectuals. With important connections to…

— Ishmael Reed

I always thought that I could write a novel. In my case, it was misguided. I do believe that the best nonfiction…

— Ron Rosenbaum

I like poetry, but honestly, I like dramatic literature more. If I had to pick between Rumi and Dostoevsky, I would pick…

— Ramin Bahrani

The spectacles of experience; through them you will see more clearly a second time.

— Henrik Ibsen

I think you can find all the elements that you can find in great literature in mundane experiences.

— Harvey Pekar

I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself...

— Thomas Bernhard

“Everything seems impossible And everything seems possible.”

— Dejan Stojanovic

“Literature enables us to see our world and ourselves more clearly, to understand our lives more fully.”

— Kylene Beers & Robert E. Probst

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on how one looks at it.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

— Jim Morrison

What makes old age so sad is, not that our joys, but that our hopes then cease.

— Jean Paul

Only as we give the children the truth about life can we expect any improvement in it.

— Mabel Robinson

Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written.

— C. V. Wedgwood

I love the way you can fall in love with a piece of literature; how words alone can get your heart doing…

— Laura Marling

An error is more useful than truth: truth is a thought suffering from arteriosclerosis.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

“Literature is too full of 'acknowledgments' and squabbles about originality...”

— George Bernard Shaw

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

— Rosemary Wells

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

— Gertrude Stein