Top 100 Great Literature Quotes
#1. Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.
Michael N. Castle
#2. After a great deal of discussion in Soviet literature about the correct definition of a combination, it was decided that from the point of view of a methodical approach it was best to settle on this definition - A combination is a forced variation with a sacrifice.
Alexander Kotov
#3. I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did.
Julie Walters
#4. It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.
Gilbert Murray
#5. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
#6. Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got to eat his sandwich every day, the dog jumped on him every day, his wife was giving him a hard time and he showed up every day.
James L. Brooks
#7. Would you like some more pancakes? Annie asked. I could tell that Annie was a smart girl. I hate to eat on the job. But I must keep up my strength.
Marjorie Weinman Sharmat
#8. What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
E. M. Forster
#9. The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
Sarah Orne Jewett
#10. I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.
Honore De Balzac
#11. I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.
Harold Bloom
#12. Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related.
Heinrich Heine
#13. Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
Edward Dahlberg
#15. I suppose it's true that most great television, literature, and other forms of high art (and basic cable) benefit from a little hindsight. 'M.A.S.H.' comes to mind. So does 'The Iliad.'
Kevin Bleyer
#16. There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and friendship.
Bertrand Russell
#17. It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?
Jeff VanderMeer
#18. Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new-create another heir
As great in admiration as herself.
William Shakespeare
#19. He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.
Stephen King
#20. Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature.
Ravi Shankar
#21. It seemed that in Paris you could discuss classic literature or architecture or great music with everyone from the garbage collector to the mayor.
Julia Child
#22. Oldboy makes us feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. It's a grand, gritty, indelible experience, the sort of picture that mimics great literature in the way it envelops you in a well-told story while also evoking subtle but strong gradations of emotion.
Stephanie Zacharek
#23. The great work of Gibbon is indispensable to the student of history. The literature of Europe offers no substitute for "The
Edward Gibbon
#24. 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
#25. The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.
Margaret Atwood
#26. Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#27. That's the great thing about literature
it makes the world less lonely.
Robert Stone
#28. Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.
Keira Knightley
#29. I don't know anything that mars a good literature so completely as too much truth. Facts contain a great deal of poetry, but you can't use too many of them without damaging your literature.
Mark Twain
#31. In the same period, Polish literature also underwent some significant changes. From social-political literature, which had a great tradition and strong motivation to be that way, Polish literature changed its focus to a psychological rather than a social one.
Andrzej Wajda
#32. Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound
#33. Ariadne made an impression on you, and that's great. But life is not literature. Sooner or later, the spell wears off, the romantic feelings disappear, and you're left watching somebody's body disintegrate. You start with a love story, you end up manacled to an hourglass, watching the sands run out.
Paul Murray
#34. I can hear some of you groaning as you read this section. "Great," you're saying. "I have to put a theme in my book? Themes are only for that 'high literature' stuff that gets taught in universities, not for my nice, entertaining genre fiction.
Libbie Hawker
#35. All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.
Carson McCullers
#36. Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?
Karen Thompson Walker
#37. The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I've had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered.
Pat Conroy
#38. C. S. Lewis said it this way: "In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. . . . I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."12
Sarah Arthur
#39. Read the great books, gentlemen," Mr. Monte said one day. "Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There's not enough time.
Pat Conroy
#40. Reading great works of literature, discovering poetry, and listening to the best composers are all ways that we learn to love the Creator more.
Jennifer A. Marshall
#41. From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today's literature is, for instance, largely destructive.
Martin Heidegger
#42. Reading a great work of literature can truly be likened to having a conversation with a great mind.
Jennie Chancey
#43. A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
Ezra Pound
#44. Dickens' London was a place of the mind, but it was also a real place. Much of what we take today to be the marvellous imaginings of a visionary novelist turn out on inspection to be the reportage of a great observer.
Judith Flanders
#45. Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.
Isaac D'Israeli
#46. Were I more conversant with literature and its great names, I could go on quoting them ad infinitum and acknowledge my debt for the merit you have been generous enough to find in my work.
Knut Hamsun
#47. She's the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She's the self-made girl!
( ... )
Well, to begin with, the self-made girl's a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn't self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.
Henry James
#48. As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.
William H Gass
#49. 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.
Scott Shane
#50. Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I've no regrets.
Roman Payne
#51. Your father may never have produced one of those stuffy tomes we call great literature, but he left the world a substantial collection of delightful adventure stories.
David E. Fessenden
#52. It seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamourous one in the fury of dissappointed love (see: Great Literature).
Julian Barnes
#54. When I was a kid, I went through the whole process of reading great literature and trying to be very widely read.
Terry Hayes
#55. Canada has always been a great place for literature. It's strong and growing stronger, and there will always be reading, and there will always be great writers.
Ruth Ozeki
#56. How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
Ernest Hemingway,
#57. I first encountered Bradbury's writing when I was pretty young. He's a great bridge author between young-adult fiction and literature.
Sam Weller
#58. The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.
Flannery O'Connor
#61. I've grown up well, partly because there weren't great girls' literature - Nancy Drew, maybe - but there weren't things. So there was Huck Finn and "Spin And Marty." The boys characters were interesting and you lived through them when you're watching it.
Meryl Streep
#62. A great work of Art demands a great thought or a thought of beauty adequately expressed. - Neither in Art nor Literature more than in Life can an ordinary thought be made interesting because well-dressed.
Margaret Fuller
#63. The herbalist I met a few times - it was great - she gave me literature about the different processes that an herbalist would do to make medicines from certain herbs and things.
Caitriona Balfe
#64. But I also think all of the great stories in literature deal with loneliness. Sometimes it's by way of heartbreak, sometimes it's by way of injustice, sometimes it's by way of fate. There's an infinite number of ways to examine it.
Tom Hanks
#65. Albert J. Guerard has justly
called the story "one of the great dark meditationsin literature, and one of the purest expressions of a melancholy temperament.
Hunt Hawkins
#66. There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
Thomas Carlyle
#67. Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
#69. Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.
Francoise Sagan
#70. Literature is the adventure. It's the story, it's the fight, it's people falling in love, it's people with deep personality disorders who succeed anyway beyond themselves. That's what great literature is.
Walter Mosley
#71. I am actuated by an ambition which I believe to be an honourable one - the ambition of serving the great cause of truth, while endeavouring to forward the literature of the country.
Edgar Allan Poe
#72. Life is short, but art is long. Sophocles is dead, but Oedipus lives on ... Each of us when we read a great piece of literature is a little more human than befor
James W. Sire
#73. And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune- all the same, let us never forget how good we all once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, ... perhaps better than we actually are.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#74. We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.
William Butler Yeats
#75. MODERN PARENTS OF TWENTY FIRST CENTURY NEEDS SPIRITUAL BRAIN WASH WITH GREAT CLASSIC LITERATURE ACROSS THE GLOBE FIRST. NATURALLY,RESULTING OUR FUTURE GLOBAL DIRECORS(INDIVIDUAL CHILDREN) WILL RE-DESGN AND RE-DRAFT LIFE DIRECTION SOFT-WARE TO UP GRADE THEIR SOULS GOD SPIRITUALITY NEXT.
Various
#76. This is the thing about great literature. It reads like truth and sticks to you forever and lets you know that you are not alone.
Arlaina Tibensky
#77. I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.
Anthony Marra
#78. The most enduring stories in literature generally have some kind of crime at their center, whether it's the bloody butchery of 'Hamlet,' the lecherous misanthropes of Dickens or the lone gunman from 'The Great Gatsby.'
Karin Slaughter
#79. I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers.
David Mitchell
#80. Small presses take chances. Chances are at the heart of all the literature we later know as great.
Kay Ryan
#82. Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.
And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.
Anna Quindlen
#83. I think the novel is a wonder....it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality....And as for the sheer writing, it's astonishing. [About The Great Gatsby]
Maxwell Perkins
#84. Don Quixote is not an imaginary person; he is as real as Alexander the Great.
Dejan Stojanovic
#85. If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelisthonours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.
D.H. Lawrence
#86. The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."
Kate Zambreno
#87. 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
#89. The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.
Hugh Blair
#90. I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.
Douglas Sirk
#91. You're like, both like, Alexander the Great.'
We can't both be Alexander.'
Well sometimes I think you're two side of the same coin, and I'm the metal in between.
Orson Scott Card
#92. I doubt if anything learnt at school is of more value than great literature learnt by heart.
Richard Livingstone
#93. In my opinion, Fiction is a figment of our imagination & it causes us to dream but Reality taints dreams, and the F.scott Fitzgerald has clearly depicted this in The Great Gatsby.
Parul Wadhwa
#94. To be up to the eyebrows in a great work of literature is such happiness.
William Maxwell
#95. We enjoy the great prophets of literature most when we have not yet lived enough to realize all they tell us.
Mary Augusta Ward
#96. I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general.
Richard Flanagan
#97. Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.
Shirley Hazzard
#98. It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.
Lev Grossman
#99. When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.
James Earl Jones
#100. [Mark] Twain is pointing at you. You, the reader of the book one hundred and thirty years ago and today. That is what has made it a great American novel and the most widely read book in American Literature around the world today.
Hal Holbrook
