Literature Quotes · Page 44

Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of…

— Paul de Man

Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he believed that harmony could never exist between the races.

— Toni Morrison

“A child's imagination can be found in the heart of a good book.”

— K. Lamb

Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.

— Romain Gary

Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.

— Charles Baxter

My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.

— Charles Baxter

I don't write poems to melt your heart. I write them, so our hearts can melt together.

— Subhan Zein

Its a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.

— Paul Di Filippo

Our pleasures in literature do not, I think, decline with age; last 1st of January was my eighty-second birthday, and I think…

— Maria Edgeworth

I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years…

— Azar Nafisi

It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway's influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.

— Arthur Phillips

Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not…

— George Steiner

All over the world, maybe besides literature, there's nothing that touches many people as movies do. People see them everywhere.

— Jane Levy

The hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this…

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Whether we know it or not, we are all in a quest after the Great Companion. All study, all art, all music,…

— Lyman Abbott

“Literary art's sudden, startling truth and beauty make us feel, in the most solitary part of us, that we are not alone,…

— Lee Siegel

Not to say that the process assumes anything of "greater" or "lesser" importance, though: it's just more graphic information. Take the surrealists,…

— Sergio Chejfec

Because my dad's Chinese-American, and they're very concrete, he said, 'There's no money to be made in literature.' So he told me…

— Tess Gerritsen

I don't think the soul is immortal, or at least not immortal in individuals, but it may be immortal as an aspect…

— Christopher Hitchens

Writers throughout the ages have one weapon, which is literature, but they also have their responsibilities as a citizen when literature does…

— Wole Soyinka

Literature for me… tries to heal the harm done by stories. (How much harm? Most of the atrocities of history have been…

— Geoff Ryman

To put it in a nutshell, the Central and South American high cultures of antiquity were entirely worthy of comparison with what…

— Joseph Needham

I and everyone else in this world live in what is probably the most difficult times that have ever been. We are…

— Stephen King

Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.

— William O. Douglas

The real world is cruel, but in the comfort of literature it can bring some light.

— Jeremy Limn

“I lose faith in mathematics, logical and rigid. What with those that even zero doesn’t accept?”

— Dejan Stojanovic

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

— William Ralph Inge

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

— Aldous Huxley

The excellence of a thing is related to its proper function.

— Aristotle

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

— Donald Barthelme

In literature as in life, to conform to anything is to knuckle under to your inferiors.

— Kenneth Patchen

I prefer to talk about the gift of literature rather than its role or task.

— Amos Oz

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

— Daniel J. Boorstin

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

— T. S. Eliot

I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.

— P. D. James

Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.

— Rebecca West

The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

— Tristan Tzara

Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.

— Gertrude Stein

With certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life.

— Cynthia Ozick