literature Quotes

Don’t be afraid! We won’t make an author of you, while there’s an honest trade to be learnt, or brick-making to turn to.

“And the great advantage of being a literary woman was that you could go everywhere and do everything.”

“We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal.”

College will probably destroy your love for poetry. Hours of boring analysis, dissection, and criticism will see to that. College will also expose you to all manner of literature—much of it transcendent works of magic that you must devour; some of it utter dreck that you must avoid like the plague.

He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it.

“Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.”

“Modernism in art contributed to the new and challenging literary styles that were emerging in Paris and throughout Europe.[...] The new generation of writers believed that the elaborate language so typical of 19th century literature was a decadence.”

“Cath felt like she was swimming in words. Drowning in them, sometimes.”

“‘The whole point of fanfiction,’ she said, ‘is that you get to play inside somebody else’s universe. Rewrite the rules. Or bend them.’”

“‘You can stay in this world, this world you love, as long as you want, as long as you keep thinking of new stories—’”

“A novel is a mirror walking down a road…Many books open with an author’s assurance of order. One slipped into their waters with a silent paddle…But novels commenced with hesitation or chaos. Readers were never fully in balance. A door a lock a weir opened and they rushed through, one hand holding a gunnel, the other a hat. When she begins a book, she enters through stilted doorways into large courtyards.”

“Television does not extend or amplify literate culture. It attacks it.”

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

“Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

“In my little street, however, domesticity prevailed. The house painter was descending his ladder; the nursemaid was wheeling the perambulator.”

“In a word, literature is my Utopia.”

“Tho why after three weeks of perfect happy peace and adjustment in these strange woods my soul so went down the drain when I came back with Dave Wain and Romana and my girl Billie and her kid, I’ll never know -- Worth the telling only if I dig deep into everything.”

“Nevertheless I go there every night even tho I don’t feel like it, it’s my duty (and probably drove me mad), and write these sea sounds, and all the whole insane poem ‘Sea.‘”

“I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten. I stood on the sidewalk a nothing, a gathering of dust.”

“I started again. This time I didn’t write about real things and I didn’t write about imaginary things. I wrote about the only thing I knew. The pages piled up.”

“She wrote to my father in Israel almost every day on expensive French stationary, and when she ran out of that she wrote to him on graph paper torn out of a notebook.”

“In the first place I spent most of my time at home, reading. I tried to stifle all that was continually seething within me by means of external impressions. And the only external means I had was reading. Reading, of course, was a great help – exciting me, giving me pleasure and pain. But at times it bored me fearfully. One longed for movement in spite of everything, and I plunged all at once into dark, underground, loathsome vice of the pettiest kind. My wretched passions were acute, smarting, from my continual, sickly irritability I had hysterical impulses, with tears and convulsions. I had no resource except reading, that is, there was nothing in my surroundings which I could respect and which attracted me.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

“He spent several days deciding on the artifacts. Much longer than he had spent deciding to kill himself, and approximately the same time required to get that many reds. He would be found lying on his back, on his bed, with a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (which would prove he had been a misunderstood superman rejected by the masses and so, in a sense, murdered by their scorn) and an unfinished letter to Exxon protesting the cancellation of his gas credit card. That way he would indict the system and achieve something by his death, over and above what the death itself achieved. Actually, he was not as sure in his mind what the death achieved as what the two artifacts achieved; but anyhow it all added up...”

“Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”

“Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement.”

“Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare.”

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”

“Within certain limits, bad thought and bad morals can be good literature. If so great a man as Tolstoy could not demonstrate the contrary, I doubt whether anyone else can either.”

“Shaw, Wilde, Robertson—I like reading plays, Bill. There are not many people who do, but those who do are usually very keen.”

He certainly did add ‘spirit’ to the meetings, and ‘a tone’ to the paper, for his orations convulsed his hearers and his contributions were excellent, being patriotic, classical, comical, or dramatic, but never sentimental. Jo regarded them as worthy of Bacon, Milton, or Shakespeare, and remodeled her own works with good effect, she thought.

“Jo, your stories are works of Shakespeare compared to half the rubbish that is published every day.”

She took to writing sensation stories, for in those dark ages, even all-perfect America read rubbish.

“Haydée—what an adorable name! Are there, then, really women who bear the name of Haydée anywhere but in Byron’s poems?”

“How about those occupations in which time is difficult to calculate? What is the labor cost of a book?”

“Literature is taking a maturer form, many injurious prejudices have been rooted up and turned into ridicule....”