Literature Quotations

Excuses change nothing, but make everyone feel better.

Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little.

We are minor in everything but our passions.

And what he greatly thought, he nobly dared.

Learning is pleasurable but doing is the height of enjoyment.

The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.

We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.

These little grey cells. It is up to them.

How blessings brighten as they take their flight.

Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.

Very few of us are what we seem.

Nothing can be done except little by little.

God is an unutterable sigh, planted in the depths of the soul.

I always treated writing as a profession, never as a hobby. If you don't believe in yourself, no one else will.

There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.

Eugene is located in western Oregon, approximately 278 billion miles from anything.

Mention the gothic, and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinister Victoriana. However, the truth is that the gothic genre has continued to flourish and evolve since the days of Bram Stoker, producing some of its most interesting and accomplished examples in the 20th century - in literature, film and beyond.

No one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand.

I wanted the press to become something of a movement. Not a movement committed to a particular "ism," but a gathering together of writers with an aesthetic approach to literature and with a lust for excellence.

Fairness is not an attitude. It's a professional skill that must be developed and exercised.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.

It's hard being visible, so I've made myself invisible.

Literature can allow us to experience the best side of humankind, where instead of giving up, we struggle desperately in the ruins for love, connection and hope.

The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature.

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

Heaven lent you a soul, Earth will lend a grave.

One of the unsung freedoms that go with a free press is the freedom not to read it.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.

Put off thy cares with thy clothes; so shall thy rest strengthen thy labor, and so thy labor sweeten thy rest.

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

It's not a good thing to be friends with people you're covering. There's just no point in doing it. It's tempting, but they're not going to consider you their friend anyway. They just know that you're somebody that can do something for them.

I've already told you: the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.

Readers probably haven't heard much about it yet, but they will. Quantum technology turns ordinary reality upside down.

I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn't a religion major really.

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

Snowboarding is an activity that is very popular with people who do not feel that regular skiing is lethal enough.

It's getting the right person that's the challenge.

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?

You seek the heights of manhood when you seek the depths of God.

Literature has always been a part of my life. I studied history and literature in college. My mother is a novelist; I grew up around books.

The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.

I knew I had to write about Canada. I just could not find in literature any examples of the immigrant experience that I've had.

Productivity - the amount of output delivered per hour of work in the economy - is often viewed as the engine of progress in modern capitalist economies. Output is everything. Time is money. The quest for increased productivity occupies reams of academic literature and haunts the waking hours of C.E.O.s and finance ministers.

If we're so cruel to minorities, why do they keep coming here? Why aren't they sneaking across the Mexican border to make their way to the Taliban?

The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.

The heart is a small thing, but desireth great matters. It is not sufficient for a kite's dinner, yet the whole world is not sufficient for it.

Oh, love will make a dog howl in rhyme.

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

I don't know why his lawyers didn't tell him, 'You don't have to answer any questions about your private life, Mr. President. Let them sue you. Take the heat. You don't have to answer.'

Journalism students need to understand it and need a solid background in the liberal arts, in sociology, economics, literature and language, because they won't get it later on.

The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter

At some stages of your life you will deal with things and at others you are overwhelmed with misery and anxiety.

There are a handful of people whom money won't spoil, and we all count ourselves among them.

They who have conquered doubt and fear have conquered failure.

I think there is no world without theatre.

I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place.

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

Virginity is the ideal of those who want to deflower.

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

For Mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.

All of us use art and literature as an escape from time to time, but if it's any good, it has a healing quality - a quality that enlarges our human spirits.

I didn't read much SF as a kid - I was a total Tolkien geek - but I started reading Samuel Delany and Angela Carter and Ursula LeGuin in high school, and I was definitely taken with the notion that here was a literature that could explore various notions of gender identity and how it affects the culture at large.

I had studied Russian in college. I had gotten into it first through literature and then just really found it kind of fascinating; of course, this was during the Cold War. So they were kind of the other great enemy that you grew up hearing about.

As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.

Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.

Roald Dahl pioneered a new kind of literature for youngsters, one that dispensed with cant and solemnity, favoring anarchy and joy over duty and humbuggery while acknowledging that oftentimes no good deed goes unpunished. But ultimately, it was his sheer joie de vivre that carried the day.

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.

I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest.

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.

American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them.

The prisoner is not the one who has commited a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

I must be doing something right. I've been around for a long time.

Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

Don't ever, ever, believe anyone who tells you that you can just get by, by doing the easiest thing possible. Because there's always somebody behind you who really wants to do what you're doing. And they're going to work harder than you if you're not working hard.

We forget the little things, so it's no wonder some of us screw up the big things.

For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.

It does not prove a thing to be right because the majority say it is so.

Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration.

Imagine this guy hits Mike Hammer over the head with a wooden coathanger and knocks him out. You hit Mike Hammer over the head with a wooden coathanger, he'll beat the crap out of you.

Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.

Some women can be fooled all of the time, and all women can be fooled some of the time, but the same woman can't be fooled by the same man in the same way more than half of the time.

Wherever you look there are inspirations, books, literature, paintings, landscapes, everything. Just living is an inspiration.

Many a thief is a better man than many a clergyman, and miles nearer to the gate of the kingdom.