Top 100 Literature Is Quotes
#1. The press is the exclusive literature of the million; to them it is literature, church, and college.
Wendell Phillips
#2. No, Ben. What I'm asking is: Are you the vehicle, and Georgie rides around in you? That is why Ben's the driver, right?
Jonathan Harnisch
#3. Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature.
Sara Sheridan
#4. Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.
Harold Bloom
#6. 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
#7. I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.
Martin Scorsese
#8. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.
Don DeLillo
#9. Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Marvell and Wordsworth are but the rustling of leaves and crackling of twigs in the forest, and there is not yet the sound of any bird. The Muse has never lifted up her voice to sing.
Henry David Thoreau
#10. Fantasy is the oldest form of literature and science fiction is just a new twist on it.
Katharine Kerr
#11. 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
#12. '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.
Edward P. Jones
#13. But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.
Aldous Huxley
#16. Science may explain how humans came into being, but it has no answer to the slippery question of how humans should live. Only literature makes it possible to pose such questions in the first place. And if there is no answer, only literature can point to the impossibility of ever finding one.
Minae Mizumura
#17. Error is far more common than fraud which probably comprises 1 percent or a tenth of a percent of the literature.
Walter Gilbert
#18. What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events?
How much of recollection is invention?
Whose invention?
Jeanette Winterson
#19. Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
Marcel Proust
#20. To be scientifically illiterate is to remain essentially uncultured. And the chief virtue of a cultural activity
be it art, music, literature, or science
is the way it enriches our lives.
Lawrence M. Krauss
#21. There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.
Alberto Manguel
#22. Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.
Greil Marcus
#23. 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
#24. The writers who reject tendentiousness and purpose in their work are the very ones who display it in every word they write. I could draw countless examples from the history of literature to show that the more a writer clamours for spiritual freedom, the more tendentious his work is liable to be.
Bjornstjerne Bjornson
#25. It is a law woven into the nature of man, attested by history, by science, by literature and art, and by dally experience, that strength of mind and force of character are the supreme rulers of human affairs.
Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II
#27. We are all one. Everything is meaningless, and yet at the same time meaningful. Everything matters and doesn't matter just as much, Wisdom said and looked beyond time.(Nakoma, by Gala.J)
Gala.J
#28. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist will blow away your expectation of what late-model literature has to be. Unified by obsessions too eerie not to be real, this gorgeous rearrangement of our century's mental furniture is testimony to a new talent of Burroughs/Coover/Acker scale.
David Foster Wallace
#29. Existence is the end of endless eternity without a beginning or an end.
Dejan Stojanovic
#31. Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.
Oscar Wilde
#32. A particular ikon an aid to devotion may be itself a word of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better ... ikon. They may make it a worse one.
C.S. Lewis
#33. You ask how it is possible to be your own father and son. You should seek answers, although it is better to anticipate some, to be the light and dream.
Dejan Stojanovic
#35. 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.
John Green
#36. Clear thinking is not the characteristic which distinguishes our literature today. We are more and more caught up by the unintelligible. People like it. This argues an inability to think, or, almost as bad, a disinclination to think.
Edith Hamilton
#37. Writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places. This is something that the labellers and their labels don't understand either.
Aminatta Forna
#38. The existence of good bad literature - the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously - is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
George Orwell
#39. There is no other proposition in economics that has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the Efficient Market Hypothesis ... In the literature of finance, accounting, and the economics of uncertainty, the EMH is accepted as a fact of life.
Michael Jensen
#40. The hope in literature is that we are allowed to be imperfect, to write of our imperfection, without being overly critiqued for being unlikeable.
Kate Zambreno
#41. The businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview.
V.S. Pritchett
#42. Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying.
James Wood
#43. No man is offended by another man's admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.
Jane Austen
#44. When literature becomes overly erudite, it means that interest in the art has gone and curiosity about the artist is what's important. It becomes a kind of idolatry.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#45. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]
Jorge Luis Borges
#46. Climbing Jacob's Ladder is a gutsy, glowing account of one man's encounter with a potent spiritual practice and how it transformed his life. This is a precious book - that rare combination of solid wisdom and good literature.
Larry Dossey
#47. The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.
Gerald Brenan
#48. National literature does not mean much these days; now is the age of world literature, and every one must contribute to hasten thearrival of that age.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#49. Literature nowadays is a trade ... the successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets.
George Gissing
#50. The mass of the people regard as profound only him who suggests pungent contradictions of the general idea. In ratiocination, not less than in literature, it is the epigram which is the most immediately and the most universally appreciated. In both, it is of the lowest order of merit.
Edgar Allan Poe
#51. Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#52. Being a literature major, you know, I'm very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.
Carrie Coon
#53. In literature there is no such thing as a pure thought; in literature, thought is always the handmaid of emotion.
J. Middleton Murry
#54. There is no publication in the scientific literature - in prestigious journals, specialty journals, or books - that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred.
Michael Behe
#55. Science, literature, and common sense tell us that the self is a fickle thing, subject to revision in real time, and that the chasm that exists between any two people exists inside each and every one of us.
Jesse Kellerman
#56. Literature may be false, but it is not trivial.
Mason Cooley
#58. The glory of the protagonist is always paid for
by a lot of secondary characters
Tony Hoagland
#59.
And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time
George Orwell
#60. 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
#61. Science fiction used to be a dangerous literature. Now, it is a very commercial genre, and whatever dangers might still lurk within seem to have been safely sanitized for the marketplace. The real crime is that the lobotomy has been self performed. I
Harlan Ellison
#62. To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.
George Steiner
#63. Understand is not the word; you are right, you can never really 'understand' about someone, anyone, even yourself. It is best to believe in them as human; feel that they are alive like you and need warmth, concern.
Rudy Wiebe
#64. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
Barbara Tuchman
#65. Literature is air, and I'm suffocating in mediocrity.
Armand Assante
#66. If you have feelings about reading, you feel the rhythm of prose or of a poem like music. It awakens something in your soul and then of course you study, read, you grow up and you begin to understand the message and that is the first step towards understanding life.
Maria Kodama
#67. An aphorism is a synthesis of poetry and prose, it is a narrative precipitate, a didactic parable, an ideological concept, in practice it 's compressed and zipped philosophy . It is literature that adapts itself to the digital age.
William C. Brown
#68. Literature is an investment of genius which has dividends to all subsequent times
John Burroughs
#69. Without people coming in to our lives we never evolve, we just remain stagnant. Surely there is more to life than standing still whilst letting it pass you by. What's even worse, is living a life pretending to be someone, or something that you believe others want you to be.
Skye High
#70. And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the observed.
Jeanette Winterson
#71. If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.
Cynthia Ozick
#72. 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.
Frederik Pohl
#73. The sermon is now the true poppy of literature.
David Swing
#74. Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.
Wole Soyinka
#75. Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving and immortal part of it.
Rafael Sabatini
#76. You're meant to think somehow that literature, in espousing eternal values, is kind of normal and balanced and reasonable. When it fact it's anything but.
Errol Morris
#77. We're supposed to see "universal" love as heterosexual. What I insist upon in my work is that there is no such thing as universal love in literature.
Audre Lorde
#78. Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.
Annie Dillard
#79. In the right hands, literature is not resorted to as a consolation, and by the broken and decayed, but as a decalogue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#80. Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
Paul Valery
#81. One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.
Anais Nin
#83. From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#84. 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,
#85. Two girls walk past in gargantuan heels and dresses so tight that their skin is spilling out, and one of them says to the other, "Wait, who the fuck is Lewis Carroll?" and in my imagination I pull a gun out of my pocket, shoot them both and then shoot myself.
Alice Oseman
#86. Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we cannot put them asunder.
C.V. Wedgwood
#87. If you're going to binge, literature is definitely the way to do it.
Oprah Winfrey
#88. But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#89. Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic.
Roy Blount Jr.
#90. If one find lost property in a locality where the majority are Israelites, he is bound to proclaim it; but he is not bound to do so if the majority be Gentiles.' -- Bava Metzia , fol 24, col. 1"
-- Hebraic Literature, page 31
Maurice H. Harris
#91. Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much.
Tom Rachman
#92. My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.
Gabrielle Zevin
#94. Yet torture is above all an art, an artistic discipline just like literature , cinema, or contemporary dance. All detained in the City-State ghettos bitterly missed the torturers of yesteryears, those monsters who worked with the precision of a Swiss watch-maker.
Fiston Mwanza Mujila
#95. Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.
William Ralph Inge
#96. This is my last communique from the planet of the monsters. Never again will I immerse myself in literature's bottomless cesspools. I will go back to writing my poems, such as they are, find a job to keep body and soul together, and make no attempt to be published.
Roberto Bolano
#97. Do you think that it is possible to have a mere taste of commonness? Either one hates it or makes common cause with it.
Franz Grillparzer
#99. What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
Doris Lessing
#100. There is no achievement gap at birth.
Lisa Delpit
