Literature Quotations | Page 2

If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.

In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought.

The United Nations has become a largely irrelevant, if not positively destructive institution, and the just-released U.N. report on the atrocities in Darfur, Sudan, proves the point.

Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts.

We thought that whatever we wanted to do was right and good, simply because we were Americans, and we would succeed at it because we were Americans.

I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's incomplete.

In literature, the ghost is almost always a metaphor for the weight of the past. I don't believe in them in the traditional sense.

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.

This country is a better place because Fox News has succeeded.

The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal.

In the end, you make your reputation and you have your success based upon credibility and being able to provide people who are really hungry for information what they want.

My hope is for a literature that raises the language above the ordinary, makes words both functional and emotional, and to resonate at the frequency of the human spirit - the skill and insight of the writer lifting the parochial novel above the level of regional concern. Making it personal, national, and universal.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

A lot of my literature deals with these people who are somehow magnetic because they have that ability to step over lines.

They've hit us and we've got to hit back hard, and I'm not just talking about the terrorists.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

Acquiring a repertoire in these days, when the vocal literature is so immense, so overwhelming, that the student with sense will devote all his energies to work and not imagine himself a martyr to art.

To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.

Music and literature have always and continue to be massive influences. Writers such as Seamus Heaney and Frank McGuinness. I have always admired the humanitarians that I knew growing up in Derry whose influence steered me in the direction of some of the work that I have chosen in the past.

I look at western literature and especially North American literature, and I feel like it gets bogged down so much with all of that, with domestic stories and relationships and a woman dealing with the loss of her husband.

Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.

In my photographs it is apparent that there was no posing at the moment I released the shutter.

Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

And they like being able to turn on the television day in and day out to see someone that they know and they feel comfortable with and trust hopefully and respect even.

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

The only peace that can be made with a dictator is once that must be based on deterrence. For today, the dictator may be your friend, but tomorrow he will need you as an enemy.

I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.

The being cannot be termed rational or virtuous, who obeys any authority, but that of reason.

Countless as the sands of the sea are human passions.

Be able to draw an illustration as least well enough to get your point across to another person.

Resistance at all cost is the most senseless act there is.

Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant.

Over the years, I've trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged.

The adolescent protagonist is one of the hallmarks of American literature.

Mark Twain created a new type of literature and not a lot of people can say that. Not a lot of people can say they're absolutely original and completely self-made.

There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature.

So much of young adult literature has turned dark, almost pathological. It's almost as if there is a race to see who can be the most dysfunctional.

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.

The ruling passion, be it what it will. The ruling passion conquers reason still.

Lotsa people want to hurt me. That's the price you pay for being a big mouth.

There's hostility to lying, and there should be.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

Literature is my calling To hold up the mirror to my countrymen comes natural to me; and in the open field of invention I am not without hopes of giving them pleasure.

It has been my experience that if we make the effort to listen to people when we meet them, and work to get to know them a little, it is then easy to find something likeable in practically anyone.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

I'm always looking, and I'm always asking questions.

There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death. Any attempt to prove otherwise constitutes unacceptable behavior.

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.

The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.

Shootouts are not gunfights of honor, they're gang wars and racial riots.

There's nothing quite like tobacco: it's the passion of decent folk, and whoever lives without tobacco doesn't deserve to live.

On almost anything someone does in the computer business, you can go back in the literature and prove someone had done it earlier.

With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.

In love, we worry more about the meaning of silences than the meaning of words.

The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia's existence.

It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry.

Be able to sneeze without sounding ridiculous. That means neither stifling yourself or spraying your immediate vicinity.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

The art of the cuisine, when fully mastered, is the one human capability of which only good things can be said.

During our stay in London for the first time I was able to establish personal contact with some of the organic chemists, whose work I knew and admired from the literature. I found them most gracious and helpful.

The new spirituality is that it will produce an experience in human encounters in which we become a living demonstration of the basic spiritual teaching 'We are all one.'

If a comparative-literature major had existed at Harvard College for undergraduates I would have surely gone in that direction.

I'm not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot.

Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an experience.

There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.

What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.

Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.

The bow cannot always stand bent, nor can human frailty subsist without some lawful recreation.

The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn when teachers themselves are taught to learn.

Reasonable men adapt to the world around them; unreasonable men make the world adapt to them. The world is changed by unreasonable men.

When you kill somebody in the movies, it matters, whereas in literature it can be allegorical.

And though it is much to be a nobleman, it is more to be a gentleman.

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.

A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.

I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.

A bad review is like baking a cake with all the best ingredients and having someone sit on it.

There were no vampires of note in Western literature until about the 18th century. But they tell us where we park our anxieties, whether its over-powerful women, death or damnation. We make our own monsters.

In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.

The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.

Envy, like the worm, never runs but to the fairest fruit; like a cunning bloodhound, it singles out the fattest deer in the flock.

I look back into past history, the stored experiences or products of the imagination. I look no further forward than the evening.

I think you can find all the elements that you can find in great literature in mundane experiences.

I grew up in a place where everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote. It was that kind of Celtic, storytelling tradition: everybody would have a story at the pub or at parties, even at the clubs and raves.

Humans have a knack for choosing precisely the things that are worst for them.

The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.

Hell is full of good meanings and wishings.

Fatalism is the lazy man's way of accepting the inevitable.

Free societies are societies in which the right of dissent is protected.

Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.

Three meals plus bedtime make four sure blessings a day.