Literary Society Quotes

#1. It was terrifying, liberating, and risky. But one day I woke up and decided to try it." (On writing her first novel, "Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society")

Amy Hill Hearth

#2. He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#3. A Literary Society is the most proper form for the introduction of our Order into any state where we are yet strangers.

Adam Weishaupt

#4. The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the love of beautiful girls will be your only reward.

Edward Abbey

#5. I promise myself great pleasure from my visit to England. You know I am to stay with Dickens while in London; and beside his own very agreeable society, I shall enjoy that of the most noted literary men of the day, which will be a great gratification to me.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#6. In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.

Cynthia Ozick

#7. Join us. Play the game. It will bring you an untold number of rewards and you will finally have some direction and purpose in your lives. Take control of yourselves and those around you. Bend them to your will and all worldly pleasures will be yours ...

Martin Hopkins

#8. What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not a debating society, not a repair shop, not a fight club or a soap box. It's a place to have a conversation about a story.

John Dufresne

#9. Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#10. The slick concrete reflected the facades of the work weary - grey, cracked and old,
but more importantly, trodden upon.

Martin Hopkins

#11. I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society. [p.92]

Northrop Frye

#12. When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#13. We have a great literary tradition in Australia. I think the book is very much alive and the more people who are encouraged to read books the better our society will be and the wiser our society will be.

George Brandis

#14. ALIF: Painting brings to life what the mind sees, as a feast for the eyes.
LAM: What the eye sees in the world enters the painting to the degree that it serves the mind.
MIM: Consequently, beauty is the eye discovering in our own world what the mind already knows.

Orhan Pamuk

#15. Ours is the country where, in order to sell your product, you don't so much point out its merits as you first work like hell to sell yourself.

Louis Kronenberger

#16. One's politics are part of one even when one is writing. But if I want to say anything about the state of civil society, I will write an essay. The responsibilities you feel as a novelist are literary ones, I think, not civic ones. And I think politicians are interesting to write about.

Thomas Mallon

#17. Experiment is actually doing the art. That's the experiment and then you get to experience the experiment.

Robert Glasper

#18. I realized that my father's absence is our slippers. In order to start to get rid of your slippers, you have to admit they are yours, and if you do, then they will get rid of themselves.

Abraham Verghese

#19. If you tell me bad things about someone, you're telling bad things about me behind me

Miguel El Portugues

#20. We should get coffee this week. If you want, that is."
"Coffee would be great," I say. Dick would be better, though.

Karina Halle

#21. His problem is that he has so completely internalized the values of his society that he judges himself by standards rooted in social myths rather than human necessities.

Christopher Bigsby

#22. It may be whispered to those uninitiated people who are anxious to know the habits and make the acquaintance of men of letters, that there are no race of people who talk about books, or, perhaps, who read books, so little as literary men.

William Makepeace Thackeray

#23. Poetry aside, a religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends, myths, or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values, and rules with which to regulate a culture or a society.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#24. I believe the visionaries and true reflections of society will be rewarded after their lives. Those being rewarded now are giving the public what it needs now, usually applauding its current state and clearing consciences.

Hollace M. Metzger

#25. In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.

Haruki Murakami

#26. Human society is the embodiment of changeless laws which the whimsicalities and circumstances of men and women involve and overwrap. The realm of literature is the realm of these accidental manners and humours
a spacious realm; and the true literary artist concerns himself mainly with them.

James Joyce

#27. All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life

John Cheever

#28. I gather they are even vaguely pacifist, not on moral grounds but from an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men and from a dash of purely fashionable and literary communism.

C.S. Lewis

#29. We are as gods to beasts of the field. We order the time of their birth and the time of their death. Between times, we have a duty.

Terry Pratchett

#30. Nothing is 'wrong' with me, Dan. What's wrong with you? she said in the same eerily quiet voice, dark eyes fixated on Dan, as she breathed heavily.

Martin Hopkins

#31. A religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends, myths or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values and rules with which to regulate a culture or society

Carlos Ruiz Zafon