Literature Quotations | Page 7

They've asked me to do this temporarily. I don't know what temporarily means. Life is temporary.

Certain political figures think when you call them and ask them for a comment; that you are somehow doing something that you shouldn't be doing.

A fast is not a hunger strike. Fasting submits to God's commands. A hunger strike makes God submit to our demands.

Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.

There are still some people out there who believe comic books are nothing more than, well, comic books. But the true cognoscenti know graphic novels are - at their best - an amazing blend of art literature and the theater of the mind.

The founding father of Albanian literature is the nineteenth-century writer Naim Frasheri. Without having the greatness of Dante or Shakespeare, he is nonetheless the founder, the emblematic character. He wrote long epic poems, as well as lyrical poetry, to awaken the national consciousness of Albania.

Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction.

I love and collect contemporary art and go to all the art fairs. I love Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney. I grew up in Italy and had a humanistic education in philosophy and literature - things I love and appreciate. People are richer and more complex than just their day-to-day professional pursuits might suggest.

As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams.

Love is always being given where it is not required.

My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.

The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.

Indeed; peace literature is almost exclusively read, though to good effect, by pacifists, while what is needed is the canvassing of those who have not so far been won to the cause.

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization.

The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.

Whoso will pray, he must fast and be clean, And fat his soul, and make his body lean.

I don't necessarily write everything as automatically assuming it will be collected, there's nothing that says Hitman will be collected, though it might be.

Yeah, but now suddenly - you know, universities are notoriously market oriented, too.

The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

There is great treasure there behind our skull and this is true about all of us. This little treasure has great, great powers, and I would say we only have learnt a very, very small part of what it can do.

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

Now, if they're there to talk about something specifically, and I determine through my own editorial judgment, that another area isn't germane, or isn't an important part of it, that's something else. But we never agree to anything in advance, absolutely not.

I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature.

I defend both the freedom of expression and society's right to counter it. I must pay the price for differing. It is the natural way of things.

Nothing is as irritating as the fellow who chats pleasantly while he's overcharging you.

In the society, where people are just parts in a larger machine, individuals are unable to develop fully.

What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.

In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal.

In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.

One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.

I went to a British Council event a while back and there were lots of German professors of literature. About half of them were convinced I had a German sense of humour and the other half were sure it was British. They are probably still arguing about it now.

There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.

And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days.

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants.

From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

Way before Watergate, senior administration officials hid behind anonymity.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.

Where youth and diffidence are united, it requires uncommon steadiness of reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl in the world.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

The great universal literature has always had a tragic relation with freedom. The Greeks renounced absolute freedom and imposed order on chaotic mythology, like a tyrant.

To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.

Don't rule out working with your hands. It does not preclude using your head.

The world doesn't need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.

My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

The president is being denounced for not taking the kind of pre-emptive action in Afghanistan that he has been so passionately denounced for taking in Iraq. Damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.

There are many types of participation. One can observe so intensely that one becomes part of the action, but without being an active participant.

If Moses had been paid newspaper rates for the Ten Commandments, he might have written the Two Thousand Commandments.

Temper your enjoyments with prudence, lest there be written on your heart that fearful word 'satiety.'

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

By far my most perilous assignment was covering a tank car explosion.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.

There is something wrong about being photographed that has nothing to do with vanity.

Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.

So much of motion, is so much of life, and so much of joy, and to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and the devil.

And in which we say that life is eternal but continue to struggle to survive.

However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.

Where there is no choice, we do well to make no difficulty.

English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.

There is a quiet revolution going on in the study of the Bible. At its center is a growing awareness that the Bible is a work of literature and that the methods of literary scholarship are a necessary part of any complete study of the Bible.

I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.

It is also said of me that I now and then contradict myself. Yes, I improve wonderfully as time goes on.

Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.

The coward only threatens when he is safe.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

'Jane Eyre,' when I think of that book, it conjures up the best moments of college English courses. Literature is extraordinary, especially when you have a good professor.

Bobby Fischer has an enormous knowledge of chess and his familiarity with the chess literature of the USSR is immense.

Literature offers not just a window into the culture of diverse regions, but also the society, the politics; it's the only place where we can keep track of ideas.

A liar will not be believed, even when he speaks the truth.

The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They've always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply.

I've shut myself inside these walls, and I'm going to be a very lonely old lady if I'm not careful.

I have no illusions that my work can rouse the masses to create change, because literature simply doesn't have that power anymore in my country, if it does anywhere. But I do hope that it can be read by those who are in positions to create change, or that it can at least be part of that dialogue.

Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.

Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.

Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.

You don't know whether he's thought through how this is going to affect the Middle East.

No matter what Aristotle and the Philosophers say, nothing is equal to tobacco; it's the passion of the well-bred, and he who lives without tobacco lives a life not worth living.

Events at home, at work, in the street - these are the bases for a story.

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.

My body has certainly wandered a good deal, but I have an uneasy suspicion that my mind has not wandered enough.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

Our passion and principals are constantly in a frenzy, but begin to shift and waver, as we return to reason.

Every true genius is bound to be naive.

Her great merit is finding out mine; there is nothing so amiable as discernment.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question.

Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.