CURSE, v.t. Energetically to belabor with a verbal slap-stick. This is an operation which in literature, particularly in the drama, is commonly fatal to the victim. Nevertheless, the liability to a cursing is a risk that cuts but a small figure in fixing the rates of life insurance. - Ambrose Bierce
No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature. - Edgar Rice Burroughs
People don't expect too much from literature. They just want to know they're not alone with being confused. - Jonathan Ames
To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength. - Lawrence Clark Powell
Literature is the real life of imaginary people. - Stefanos Livos
I wonder how appropriate it is to try to 'argue someone into the kingdom.' Many apologists hotly deny any such charge, but I don't believe them. The tenor of almost all apologetics literature makes it plain that this is their intent. - Robert M. Price
The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades. - Mark Twain
It’s very fluid, this space between philosophy and literature, and that’s something that resonates for me. - Tom McCarthy
Very much of the literature of economics strikes me as rationalization after the event. - John H. Williams
The day came when she discovered sex, sensuality, and literature; she said, 'I submit! Let my life be henceforth ruled by poetry. Let me reign as the queen of my dreams until I become nothing less than the heroine of God. - Roman Payne
Love that Literature. - S. McPherson
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. - Jorge Luis Borges
The singular power of literature lies not in its capacity for accurate representation of mass commonalities, but its ability to illuminate the individual life in a way that expands our understanding of some previously unseen or unarticulated aspect of existence. - Nicole Krauss
Kid's books should be just as good as any other books. No. They should be held to a *higher* standard than other literature for the same reason that we take extra care with children's food. - Patrick Rothfuss
Personal experience is the basis of all real literature. - George Henry Lewis
True education does not consist merely in the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but in the development of character. - David O. McKay
You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature. - Mahatma Gandhi
Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it’s seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don’t share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit. - Richard Flanagan
Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty. - Lionel Trilling
Science begs literature to develop wings. - Santosh Kalwar
To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of literature as it is possible to get and indeed it is, in my opinion, the purest form of intellectual barbarism. - Edward W. Said
Literature endures like the universal spirit,And its breath becomes a part of the vitals of all men. - Li Shang-yin
Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it. - Witold Gombrowicz
Sigmund Freud was a half baked Viennese quack. Our literature, culture, and the the films of Woody Allen would be better today if Freud had never written a word.
To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature. - Ernst Fischer
Literature simply becomes richer after you've been fired, rejected, stranded, or had to change a few midnight diapers. - Christian Bauman
It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics. - Richard Dawkins
Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature. - Sara Sheridan
Without literature, life is hell. - Charles Bukowski
The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual -- when it begins to ignore the passions, the motions -- it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance. - Isaac Bashevis Singer
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose. - Margaret Atwood
Literature should be a kind of revolutionary manifesto against established morality and established society. - Guo Moruo
The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie. - James Dickey
We have invented the literature because the reality wasn’t imaginative enough and we also wanted to be alone, at least for a while! - Mehmet Murat ildan
Great literature is simply charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. - Ezra Pound
Many people don’t realize the connection between music and literature and I’m here to tell them that it does exist! - Veronika Carnaby
The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature. - C.S. Lewis
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. - Roman Payne
Literature is news which stays news. - Ezra Pound
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself. - Eleanor Roosevelt
Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything. - André Breton
If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins. - Yann Martel
Journalism is unreadable, and literature is unread. - Oscar Wilde
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once. - Cyril Connolly
Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about. - Thomas McGuane
There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. - George Washington
Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other. Though it is irregular, it is less boring this way, and besides, neither of them loses anything through my infidelity. - Anton Chekhov
Literature is a mountain made of gold in this poor world! - Mehmet Murat ildan
Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. - Henry Miller
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. - Virginia Woolf
Literature, the act of writing, affirms life, however dark the story it tells. - Marty Rubin
The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations. - Iris Murdoch
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary. - Boris Pasternak
But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present. - Tim Parks
Culture is fundamental. Literature saves you. Cinema saves you. - Léa Seydoux
I never thought I'd fall madly in love with literature. - Wency June Libot
Google brooklyn writer and you’ll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it? - Colson Whitehead
For ages past the Genius of Literature and the Genius of Art have walked together hand in hand. For the Goddess of letters is blind, and only she of Art can lend her sight. - Howard Pyle
Like works of literature, mathematical ideas help expand our circle of empathy, liberating us from the tyranny of a single, parochial point of view. - Daniel Tammet Thinking in Numbers How Maths Illuminates Our Lives
Without travels, our existence, our memories, our literature, our dreams, our everything would be very poor, very boring, very limited! - Mehmet Murat ildan
Too many writers are trying to write with too shallow an education. Whether they go to college or not is immaterial...a good writer needs a sense of the history of literature to be successful as a writer. - James Kisner
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become. - C.S. Lewis
Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path. - Edgar Allan Poe
Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. - Oscar Wilde
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. - Dorothy L. Sayers
Literature tries to express the intricate inner beauties of life. Philosophy tries to explain the intricate inner beauties and conflicts of thoughts. - Debasish Mridha
People won't see Imagination in something that doesn't relate to their experience because of their own mental limitations. I want people to escape the expected and ordinary, to escape the regular expectations of a story, and truly step into a different world of literature. - Lionel Suggs
I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in my own life. - James Branch Cabell
...the pleasures of literary fiction are the pleasures of orientation; the pleasures of literature are the pleasures of bewilderment. - Toby Litt
I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"] - William Matthews
Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score. - Kurt Vonnegut
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. - Italo Calvino
High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water. - Mark Twain
What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless 'Why?' and 'What next?'("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy") - Yevgeny Zamyatin
If I may paraphrase 's well-known aphorism, I would say that 'books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science. Thomas Henry Huxley - Hobbes
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). - John Scalzi
When your life is stormy, take a refuge to a port: To music or to literature, in short, to art, to any kind of art! - Mehmet Murat ildan
Literature gives great light and great life. - Lailah Gifty Akita
Good literature is one key to peace. When we stop reading each other, when we stop paying attention to each other's words and stories, we too easily oppose one another. - Dave DiGrazie
To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."[The Title Always Comes Last; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile] - David McCullough
what can be the best way to express emotions, if not literature - alisha shaikh
Literature is sacred knowledge - Lailah Gifty Akita
literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people. - Gabriel García Márquez
Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths. - Jonathan Stroud
Literature is the question without the answer. Philosophy is the answer without the question. - Chloe Thurlow
Literature is an invitation to people to discover the world of others and the world of others is the best source to understand and to improve our own world! - Mehmet Murat ildan
Literature is a vast ocean, in which one has to drown themselves to be able to conquer it. Those on shore can see a side of it or have tasted a part of it. And I choose to drown myself in it than just to see it. - Nikita Dudani
Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. - Anthony Powell
In literature, as in love, one can only speak for himself. - Andrew Lang
In literature, you either create a classical or create a foam! There is no in between! - Mehmet Murat ildan
Literature doesn’t exactly have a strong mental-health track record. - Lemony Snicket
In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others. - Andre Maurois
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. - Julian Barnes
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice. - Cyril Connolly
Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist. - Adam Gopnik
Literature is painting, architecture, and music. - Yevgeny Zamyatin
Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified. - Kathy Acker
A history of literature, unlike history as such, ought to list only victories, for its defeats are no victory for anyone. - Julien Gracq
The literature of America should reflect the children of America. - Lucille Clifton
An oft-quoted statistic from the [United Nations] reports is that the amount of literature translated into Spanish in a single year exceeds the entire corpus of what has been translated into Arabic in 1,000 years. - The Economist
Literature is the product of a deep-seated need for honesty. Hence, those who lie most are struck most deeply by it, and those who are honest have no need for it. - Anthony Marais
All literature and popular art contain themes that resonate with the audience. - Daniel Lambert
Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions. - A.E. Housman
Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives. - Laurie Anderson
An unhappy ending makes it literature rather than romantic fiction. - Victoria Clayton
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. - Georges Bataille
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read - Oscar Wilde
Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings. - Russell Kirk
My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably. - George Bernard Shaw
I'm kind of hooked to the game of art and literature; my heroes are artists and writers. - Jim Morrison
It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. but business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment. - Eric Hoffer
Experience, derived from scientific investigation, led to all the scientific literature in history. Likewise, experience, derived from religious transcendence, led to all the religious scriptures in history. It's never the other way around. - Abhijit Naskar
I won't stop writing until I am known as the Kurt Cobain of literature! - Christina Westover
Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments. - Isaac Asimov
One: I am proud to say that my vampires do not sparkle.Two: I feel like in literature that we've gone [this way] towards the kissing vampires side of the needle. I think it's time we go back towards the killing vampires side of the needle. - Seth Grahame-Smith
Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic. - Roy Blount Jr.
Writers more interested in literature than the truth ensure that they never come out with either thing — one reason that the word literature today sounds so fake, as if you were to insist on saying cuisine every time you meant food. Food, as in sustenance, is more like what we have in mind. - The editors n+1
Literature, art, science, and religion degenerate when polemical struggle supplants the independent creation of ideas. - Semen Frank
Horror. I can't manage it. I become--well--horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect. When asked, "Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?" - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by Pamela Paul) - Emma Thompson
Puns are the highest form of literature. - Alfred Hitchcock
This is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong. - F.Scott Fitzgerlad
My world is about stories that entertain; emotions that move; people you’ll remember; literature that matters. - M.G. Crisci
Human beings don’t necessarily exist inside of (or correspond to) the neat racial, gendered or national boxes into which we often unthinkingly place them.It’s a mistake to ask literature to reinforce such structures. Literature tends to crack them. Literature is where we free ourselves. - Mohsin Hamid
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. - Helen Keller
To tell the truth, my dear count, I must own that of all nauseating human emanations, literature is one of those which disgust me most. I can see nothing in it but compromise and flattery. And I go so far as to doubt whether it can be anything else. - André Gide
To be scientifically illiterate is to remain essentially uncultured. And the chief virtue of a cultural activity--be it art, music, literature, or science--is the way it enriches our lives. - Lawrence M. Krauss
Literature will save me it's the only certainty i am sure of. - Nikki Rowe
Literature is news that stays news. - Ezra Pound
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. - Henry James
Literature is light. - Lailah Gifty Akita
Crammed among the stacks of books in his room, the author treated literature as if each book were a window in a city of unstable skyscrapers, and he was the window-washer tasked with the impossible job of cleaning them all. - From "Pageturner" in 365 Tomorrows - Joseph Patrick Pascale
I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end. - Jorge Luis Borges
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement. - William Stafford
Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness. - F.R. Leavis
Literature decays only as men become more and more corrupt. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other - Anton Chekhov
Crammed among the stacks of books in his room, the author treated literature as if each book were a window in a city of unstable skyscrapers, and he was the window-washer tasked with the impossible job of cleaning them all. - from Pageturner in 365 Tomorrows - Joseph Patrick Pascale
Great Literature is simply language charged to the utmost with meaning - Ezra Pound
Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none - Jules Renard
If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories. - Susan Sontag
...I have concluded that Literature is no proper pursuit for a gentleman; and that Writing ought never to be consider'd but as an elegant Accomplishment to be indulg'd in with infrequency, and Discrimination. - H. P. Lovecraft
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. - C. S. Lewis
The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink. - T.S. Eliot
We obtained literature by our own efforts, it is a product of our own life, and that is why we love it so much and hold it so dear, why we pin our hopes on it. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I am the penny whistle of American literature. - Nelson Algren
Literature matters because it is how humanity, with all its losses and joys, can become a work of art. - Lisa C. Taylor
To leap over the wall of self, to look through another’s eyes--this is valuable experience, which literature offers. - X. J. Kennedy
Literature takes us away from our grey everyday experience, but brings us back enriched with new sensibilities. - Willie van Peer
Like the 'good' characters in literature, the sane don't have any memorable lines. - Adam Phillips Going Sane
But what is the difference between literature and journalism? ...Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all. - Oscar Wilde
In literature, sex is part of the story; in pornography, it's the whole story. - Marty Rubin
Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying. - Oscar Wilde
Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature. - Fran Lebowitz
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others. - Virginia Woolf
We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece. - Percy Bysshe Shelley
literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed. - Henry Miller
The love for literature is the key to knowledge. - Lailah Gifty Akita
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real. - George Bernard Shaw
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a happy bunch of chuckleheads. - William Styron
Every sport pretends to be literature. . . - Alistair Cooke
It is raining! In other words little poems are coming down from the sky! Nature is literature! Sun is a fable; forest is a story; birds are a theatre; mountains are a myth; rain is a poem! Nature is literature! - Mehmet Murat ildan
The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature. - Dorothy Parker
All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else. - Franz Kafka
Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else. - Colum McCann
If you want to understand what's most important to a society, don't examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings. - Joseph Campbell
There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature. - P.G. Wodehouse
Mr. McGregor's a nasty piece of work, isn't he? Quite the Darth Vader of children's literature. - Jasper Fforde
There is nothing political about American literature. - Laura Bush
Within a week I walked the streets of Tel-Aviv, I wandered around Budapest and found myself admiring the Architecture of Paris. That's the power of great literature. - Byron Ortiz
In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
It did occur to me that the effect of good literature may be as dizzying as that of alcohol. - Pamela Dean
Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose. - Oscar Wilde
You want to go to a place where you never lose anything and you keep gaining many things? Go to the Land Of Literature where you gain new paths, new ideas, new lives, new goals, and new souls! - Mehmet Murat ildan
The love for literature is a great light. - Lailah Gifty Akita
Despite centuries of English literature, the most famous split infinitive in all of history comes from Star Trek. - R. Curtis Venture
I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of. - Dashiell Hammett
Literature is a microscope; it shows us the unseen! - Mehmet Murat ildan
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. - G.K. Chesterton
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. - Leo Tolstoy
Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. - Henry Miller
The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight. - Gabriel García Márquez
Literature is a sacred knowledge. - Lailah Gifty Akita
Animals in children’s literature always have a soul life because children perceive animals as having souls. - Linda Bender
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom. - Susan Sontag
Of course, that’s one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We’re still waiting for the results. - Charles Finch
Yes, looking through the eyes of literature we may talk about the beauty of sadness! But in the eyes of truth, sadness is just saddening; there is no beauty there, only a touching desperation! - Mehmet Murat ildan
Paris has history, it has art, it has wonderful architecture, it has literature, but much more important than all these, it has freedom! If a city cannot offer freedom to its dwellers, all its other beauties will be meaningless! - Mehmet Murat ildan
I wrote "David" because it seemed to me that children, who can love a book more passionately than any grown person, got such a lot of harmless entertainment and not enough real, valuable literature. - Anne Holm
Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up. - Vladimir Nabokov
Literature is language charged with meaning - Ezra Pound
God really must have had a sense of humor, because if I had to name my biggest turn-on, it was literature. And he had just recommended a book that I didn’t know, that wasn’t taught in school. If I were single, there would be no better pick-up line. - Kody Keplinger
...with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature. - P.G. Wodehouse
What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place. - Elif Batuman
Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth. - Dr. Seuss
Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form. - Toni Morrison
In your opinion, where do private and political life, personal history and History meet? You know the answer, Maya. You say it unhesitatingly - in art and literature. - Abdourahman A. Waberi
Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains. - Henri Bergson
People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are. - G.K. Chesterton
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads. - William Styron
Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others. - W.B. Yeats
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility. - Oscar Wilde
Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be.(Southey's reply to Charlotte Bronte) - Robert Southey
The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more. - John Green
Literature is one kind of aesthetic politics. - Md. Mujib Ullah
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. - Susan Sontag
Literature is my Utopia - Helen Keller
When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature - Tzvetan Todorov
The gift of literature is the grace of knowledge. - Lailah Gifty Akita
My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure. - Gene Wolfe
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it. - George Bernard Shaw
When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young. - Maya Angelou
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. - Barbara W. Tuchman
Science fiction is the one literature that deals with today's reality - that provides a basis for discussion and understanding of the complex events of our time. It opens the doors for students - doors into all branches of knowledge. - Biggle
Here we are in the century of information, that is to say the unformed. Every kind of literature will be journalistic, with a science for ballast. - Julien Torma
A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature. - John Henry Newman
The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science. - Rachel Carson
We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement. - B.F. Skinner
The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood. - John Burroughs
Dead parents are gruesome, yes, but anyone who’s anyone in children’s literature has either been orphaned or abandoned; well-adjusted kids from stable two-parent homes don’t go on hero quests. - Lynn Messina
Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself. - Samuel Butler
The literature [Nobel] laureate of this year has said that an author can do anything as long as his readers believe him.A scientist cannot do anything that is not checked and rechecked by scientists of this network before it is accepted. - Sune Bergström
Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out … - Ben Marcus
Every man's memory is his private literature. - Aldous Huxley
I just can't get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they want is a fairy tale. - China Miéville
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business. - Henry David Thoreau
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy. - Gustave Flaubert
Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends. - Alphonse de Lamartine
The passion to teach, to share deeplyexperienced lessons from life, is embedded in all literature. - Vera B. Williams
Give yourself to reading.’... You need to read. Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible sound theological works,especially the Puritanic writers, and expositions of the Bible. - Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child...Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence. - Orson Scott Card
Good literature is a lifeboat! Every time you feel you are sinking, jump on it! - Mehmet Murat ildan
I do have a religion; it’s just not an ordinary one. In fact it is an extraordinary one. My religion is Literature. - Stephan Attia
We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature. - M.H. Abrams
Literature has the ability to open up a whole new world to children, but we need to have a share in helping them to find that door and open it with them. Let’s set the example and help to foster this love of reading in our little ones. - Carmela Dutra
Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks. - Julian Barnes
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. - Ezra Pound
Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience. - Ralph Ellison
Our American professors like their literature clear, cold, pure and very dead. - Sinclair Lewis
What great literature does best is to show us those moments which make life worth living. - Marty Rubin
If literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring. - Georges Bataille
Reading a great work of literature can truly be likened to having a conversation with a great mind. - Jennie Chancey
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart. - Salman Rushdie
Literature cannot be imposed; it must be discovered. - Amy Joy
And that is to say, of course, that you can "read" a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the balance with each other. - Richard Mitchell
What good literature can do and does do—far greater than any importation of morality—is touch the human soul. - Karen Swallow Prior
Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality. - Romain Gary
Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned. - Thomas Sowell
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong. - F. Scott Fitzgerald