Literature Quotes
Jennifer Elisabeth
How you spend your time when you are not working or studying says everything about who you are and what is motivating your life.
4148Jennifer Elisabeth
I never want a girl to lose all hope that her life can’t completely turn around, even if she feels that she is at the edge, standing on one foot, and ready to say goodbye.
3713 Annie Dillard
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
3467 Krystal McLean
. . . you don’t need a happy ending to move onto a happy beginning.
4351 Roman Payne
She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing for rules or customs. 'Time' for her isn’t something to fight against. Her life flows clean, with passion, like fresh water.
4779 Roman Payne
You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination.
1319 Terry Pratchett
Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.
3589 Howard Nemerov
Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
2215 Matthew Quick
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.
3920 Roman Payne
I was an adventurer, but she was not an adventuress. She was a 'wanderess.' Thus, she didn’t care about money, only experiences - whether they came from wealth or from poverty, it was all the same to her.
1954 Roman Payne
When she was a child, my love carried a road-map in her hand the way other girls carried handkerchiefs. She always knew the way. Her feet were little wings. And her beautiful head was a compass.
1592 Dejan Stojanovic
To risk life to save a smile on a face of a woman or a child is the secret of chivalry.
1215 Dejan Stojanovic
Nature is an outcry, unpolished truth; the art - a euphemism - tamed wilderness.
2656 Arthur Miller
It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves
3243 Vera Nazarian
I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you realize it, the world is shaped by two things - stories told and the memories they leave behind.
1989 Amaka Imani Nkosazana
You never know who you're inspiring or uninspiring. People notice more than you think.
4053 Dejan Stojanovic
The same word we love and hate, leaves in different directions, taking different paths.
4597 Ernest Hemingway
Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.
1930 Roman Payne
She called herself Europa, and wandered the world from girlhood till death. She believed only in her life and in her dreams. She called herself Europa, and her god was Beauty.
4240 Benjamin J. Carey
At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.
2587 Christopher Hitchens
Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't.
1108 Thomas McGuane
Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.
3598 J.D. Salinger
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
4285 Ishmael Reed
No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.
2969 Christopher Hitchens
Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.
2159 Virginia Woolf
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
2588 Charles Baudelaire
If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.
1233 Tom Waits
The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.
1538 John Scalzi
In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a).
2372 Dan Simmons
In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.
2898 Italo Calvino
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
4231 Virginia Woolf
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
1675 Lawrence Clark Powell
To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
2753 Amy Joy
Anyone who says writing is easy isn't doing it right.
4917 Roman Payne
Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!
3324 Joseph Conrad
A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!
3276 Anthony Burgess
Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
3272 Kenneth Oppel
You can't eat [literature], that's the problem," he said. "I've tried, it's very dry, and not at all nutritious.
1095 Roman Payne
Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons.
1523 Junot Díaz
In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.
1592 Don DeLillo
When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.
4917 Jan Neruda
No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We’ve got too many dexterous drudges as it is.
3470 Kurt Vonnegut
I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
3787 George Bernard Shaw
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
4867 Albert Camus
In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul
2115 Northrop Frye
The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.
1222 Ren Garcia
Trying to live up to yourself is the most trying thing.
3872 Dorothy L. Sayers
this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.
3951 Stephen Crane
It perhaps might be said-if any one dared-that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another.
3704 Julio Cortázar
Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature
2981 Amy Joy
Words are a puzzle; put them together the right way and you get something beautiful.
1462 Cyril Connolly
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.
3678 Julian Barnes
What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.
1985 Niall Williams
All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are
3427 Dejan Stojanovic
I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.
4554 Orson Scott Card
As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human being writing human literature to a human audience.
1181 Aberjhani
The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.
3357 Christina Westover
I won't stop writing until I am known as the Kurt Cobain of literature!
1011 H.G. Wells
Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.
3081 Samuel Johnson
While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.
1248 Yevgeny Zamyatin
The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.
4066 Don DeLillo
It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.
2841 Georges Bataille
Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.
2188 Vladimir Nabokov
The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.
3797 Ivan Klíma
..the writer’s obsession – the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.
1323 Julian Barnes
Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
4164 Dejan Stojanovic
If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.
2106 Roberto Bolaño
Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish literature, not German literature, at least for the first two years of his university career, among other sad reasons because he dreamed of being a writer.
3040 Emily Dickinson
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul.
3829 Gaston Bachelard
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
2444 Emily Dickinson
He ate and drank the precious words,
His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book. What liberty
A loosened spirit brings!
1741 Edna St. Vincent Millay
Stranger, pause and look;
From the dust of ages
Lift this little book,
Turn the tattered pages,
Read me, do not let me die!
Search the fading letters finding
Steadfast in the broken binding
All that once was I!
1688 Billy Collins
I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow
2146 Emily Dickinson
A precious, mouldering pleasure ’t is
To meet an antique book,
In just the dress his century wore;
A privilege, I think.
4581 Louis Aragon
Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.
4873 Munia Khan
A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.
3717 Marguerite Yourcenar
The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.
2394 Wilkie Collins
The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of my life that I can look back on with something like pride... Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught.
2159 Dejan Stojanovic
Since there is no real silence,
Silence will contain all the sounds,
All the words, all the languages,
All knowledge, all memory.
1682 David Nicholls
There seemed no reason why she shouldn't try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same - you couldn't just soak it up and then squeeze it out again.
1939 Jennifer Elisabeth
Starting over can be the scariest thing in the entire world, whether it’s leaving a lover, a school, a team, a friend or anything else that feels like a core part of our identity but when your gut is telling you that something here isn’t right or feels unsafe, I really want you to listen and trust in that voice.
3339 Jennifer Elisabeth
Being a Dream Girl is never going to be about what you look like or how much you weigh. After all, our physical appearances are just reflections of our inner worlds. What makes you a Dream Girl is your emotional sensitivity, your self-awareness, and your ability to communicate who you are effectively and compassionately in the world.
2375 Jennifer Elisabeth
Remember, nothing happens before it’s supposed to, so trust that, as you are striving for authenticity and personal excellence, the recognition of your life’s purpose is nearing closer.
1099 Jennifer Elisabeth
I never want you to deny anything about yourself because you have grown up thinking it’s unacceptable or inconvenient for the people around you.
1021 Jennifer Elisabeth
This is your life – not your parents’, teachers’ or significant other’s. If you ever find yourself on a path that just doesn’t feel safe anymore, you have every right to stop the car, get out – change your shoes and start walking.
3566 Jennifer Elisabeth
Even if we try to conform to ideals and strive for perfection, we will always be pulled back to our core identity because it’s the path of least resistance for our souls – an energy force that wants nothing more than for us to honor and accept who we are and discover what we’re meant to do in the world.
4722 Jennifer Elisabeth
We live in a world where there is such a clear definition of what a girl should be that it takes almost no effort at all to completely hate ourselves.
2924 Jennifer Elisabeth
You battled monsters. You sweat and cried your way to this one prolific moment where you finally realize that those dark days and sleepless nights were pre-requisites to your becoming.
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