Top 100 Literature You Quotes
#1. I have spent my spare time studying literature popular with young women of this planet. One should always study the battlefield."
Sean glanced at him. "And?"
"I suggest you give up now. According to my research, in a vampire-werewolf love triangle, the vampire always gets the girl.
Ilona Andrews
#2. She comes to naught, my dear one, she comes to naught, all that there business. What the hell, maybe twice in your life you have yourself a whore of a good time, and then you spend every night of the rest of your life trying to get that good time back. But she comes to naught.
Lynn Coady
#3. The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures
I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real and imagined road.
Paul Theroux
#4. 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
#5. I would say if you are familiar with our history and the history of our art and literature that you see a clear cut pattern of people wanting to contribute, not only artistically, but in some practical purpose, for the benefits of the community.
Gil Scott-Heron
#6. If your mind is loaded with many burdens, you will not feel yourself empty even in an empty place!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#7. I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times.
Jo Walton
#8. I think the genre of comics sometimes overtakes the medium, and people assume that they are kind of frivolous. If you have a good, strong story teller, they can be as affecting as any character in literature. Period.
Chip Kidd
#9. People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!
Mary Gordon
#10. When I was a worker I busied myself with socialist or, if you like, marxist literature.
Adolf Hitler
#11. 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
#12. If you hurt her any more than you already have, the wound could be too deep to fix.
Haruki Murakami
#13. Horror. I can't manage it. I become
well
horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect.
When asked, "Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?" - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by Pamela Paul)
Emma Thompson
#15. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
#16. If you read the literature of Soviet Communism, you see a dogma that's chilling. On the other hand, if you read the literature of anti-communism, it's every bit as dogmatic.
Bill Ayers
#17. Whatever it is that you're feeling, whatever it is you have a question about, whatever it is that you long to know, there is some book, somewhere, with the key. You just have to search for it.
Adriana Trigiani
#18. You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature.
Mahatma Gandhi
#19. Once
God wrote a story
that shook the heaven to the very core.
Love was the only language used;
You and I
were the only characters.
Subhan Zein
#20. I give pleasure to you. Do not interfere..." #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion
Olga Goa
#21. Through helping one another, you can often eliminate the prefix 'im' from the word impossible!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#22. Don't forget to speak scornfully of the Victorian Age; there will be time for meekness when you try to better it. Very soon you will be Victorian or that sort of thing yourselves; next session probably, when the freshman come up.
J.M. Barrie
#23. A magpie can be happy or sad: sometimes so happy that he sits on a high, high gum tree and rolls the sunrise around in his throat like beads of pink sunlight; and sometimes so sad that you would expect the tears to drip off his beak.
This magpie was like that.
Colin Thiele
#24. Everything we do is escapism, because we'll all be dead and everything we do is completely meaningless. Why brush your teeth? Why not be in the park with the bums passing a short dog? Why pay taxes, why get educated? Of course literature is an escape. You have to fill the hours.
T.C. Boyle
#25. 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
#27. If you ever meet someone who thinks they are so special, the best thing to do is smile. You don't have to say anything. Be friendly and then go do
your best. That will make you special, too!
Jeff Hutchins
#28. Luckily, what you trade off in not being part of the comic book canon and not having some literature that you can use to your benefit, in terms of figuring out who you are, you gain in the ability to just be whoever you want to be.
Dallas Roberts
#29. '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
#30. You will come across people who always affirm by everything you say, but at the hour of need, they simply disappear! Stay away from such people or simply don't fall for their promises.
K. Hari Kumar
#31. To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children.
Polykarp Kusch
#32. You are free to make your own choices, but ultimately your choices make you.
C.D. Sutherland
#33. If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
Don DeLillo
#34. The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.
Jamie L. Harding
#35. Perfect," he groaned. "You are perfect." He sank his teeth into her ass, hard, drawing blood. "And now you wear my mark," he finished proudly. "Your ass is mine.
Hanna Lui
#36. Change for someone today and tomorrow you will hear them say, "You are not the same.
Akash Lakhotia
#37. You know, I don't think your brother dislikes you as much as you think. After all, he gave up a kingdom to stay with his family.
C.J. Milbrandt
#38. In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose.
G.K. Chesterton
#39. Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
Henry Miller
#40. If you're going to fall in love with anyone, fall in love with a writer. Allow yourself to become immortalised in words.
Jamie L. Harding
#41. Destroy your manuscript, but save whatever you have inscribed in the margin out of boredom, out of helplessness, and, as it were, in a dream. (The Egyptian Stamp)
Osip Mandelstam
#42. Mark Twain was an artist working at the highest level. He wrote a book, his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that put America on the world stage for literature. It's almost as if, if you start reading that book as a racist, you cannot finish it and still be a racist.
Val Kilmer
#43. And what does a person with such romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics?
If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective, I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.
Donna Tartt
#44. ...if you were convinced that the world had forgotten how to think and teach, if you believed it had discarded the beauty of art and literature, if you thought it had crushed the power of truth, would you let that world educate your children?
Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera
#45. If you have a big heart, you will live a large life.
Yvonne Jayne
#46. We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.
Sarah Waters
#47. I looked into the literature on this," said Nightingale, "and it wasn't very helpful."
"There's a literature about this?"
"You'd be amazed, Constable, about what there's a literature on.
Ben Aaronovitch
#48. 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
#49. This is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity ... You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#50. 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
#51. A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.
A.S. Byatt
#52. 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
#53. How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line - how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined - well, a good poem.
Ashley Hay
#54. Anyone who shoots a real gun at you when drunk and angry is simply not husband material, regardless of his taste in literature.
James Tiptree Jr.
#55. You don't know what it means to live the life that you could have lived, if an event over which you have no control, an unforeseeable circumstance, had not distracted and diverted you, and at times crushed you, as has happened to me.
Luigi Pirandello
#56. Is literature more important than hurting people? You can't argue that. You can't say it. It's impossible.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
#57. You must remember that no one lives a life free from pain and suffering.
Sophocles
#58. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
J.D. Salinger
#59. You see the world in colors,
I see in Black and Red.
Irum Zahra
#60. Money has the power to get, all that you want.
Money has the power to make you forget, all that you want.
Akash Lakhotia
#61. 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
#62. You must return to the fairy cave while children sleep. Fairies only exist if children believe in Fairyland. If you return after they wake from their dreams, you could remain frozen between two worlds for all eternity.
Caz Greenham
#63. Jane Austen would be so proud. Another girl trussed up for a fancy party."
"On the contrary, she'd be horrified. All that skin. You'd need about another five yards of material.
Mary Jane Hathaway
#64. They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.
'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.
John Gardner
#65. I can assure you Ernest Hemingway was wrong when he said modern American literature began with Huckleberry Finn. It begins with Moby-Dick, the book that swallowed European civilization whole.
E.L. Doctorow
#66. 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
#67. Wherever you look there are inspirations, books, literature, paintings, landscapes, everything. Just living is an inspiration.
Gavin Rossdale
#68. I went to study English for two reasons. Principally because when I was in university, studying drama wasn't considered an option. You couldn't get a degree course for it. And so many plays and things that I was interested in landed themselves in a broader spectrum of literature.
James Callis
#69. Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.
Abraham Verghese
#70. When you realize that your history books and your science books and your literature books are not the result of experts sitting down and making it a wise decision, but of political pressure groups coming to the state textbook hearings, this is wrong.
Diane Ravitch
#71. The literature of menopause is the saddest, the most awful, and the most medical of all genres. You're sleepless, you're anxious, you're fat, you're depressed - and the advice is always the same: take more walks, eat some kale, and drink lots of water. It didn't help.
Sandra Tsing Loh
#72. The best thing is to walk on the right path without looking back, without knowing who is following you because you must walk with your own speed, with your own freedom! Your followers will catch you or your ideas somehow somewhere ahead, somewhere in time!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#73. Here, you can walk into a bookstore and pick up a Bible or Christian literature and learn. Over there, they are lucky if they have one Bible for a whole village.
Michael Scott
#75. Love is full of pain and mistakes. That's what makes it interesting and that's why we explore relationships in literature. That whole 'love is never having to say you're sorry' crap is just that, crap. Love is learning how to say you're sorry.
Richard Paul Evans
#76. Frieda, you despise English music. You know you do. And English art. And English literature, except Shakespeare, and he's a German.
E. M. Forster
#77. Pull a thread here and you'll find it's attached to the rest of the world.
Nadeem Aslam
#78. He yelled, Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.
Saul Bellow
#79. Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author's own conscience.
Anton Chekhov
#80. Most important thing in life is family,
Without them you are nothing.
Whatever you do will be worth nothing,
If there is no one to appreciate it.
Akash Lakhotia
#82. Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible - time-freed, existential youth forever. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth. And literature, being lasting, is their ticket.
Richard Ford
#83. Say, you told me you thought Les Miserables was the greatest novel ever written. I think Vanity Fair is the greatest. Let's fight. - Joe Willard
Maud Hart Lovelace
#84. I will never see the day where I choose to fall upon my own sword of refuge. In knowing this, I also know that you will never ultimately defeat me; for my life is my own, and I will see to it accordingly.
Danish Sayanee
#85. Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.
Tom Spanbauer
#86. You aren't in the ivy halls of your miserable literature pursuit now. Without wasting more time, will thou cometh to the pointeth? Dost thou wanteth us to stayeth or leaveth?
Pawan Mishra
#87. When a powerful storm collides with a much more powerful storm, it will understand that his power was just a dust before the wind! You can be a giant only until a bigger giant comes and erases your existence!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#88. 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
#89. I got my first whiff of what big-time adult literature was all about when I was in 8th grade. I got it from Mark Linn-Baker. You know - the guy from 'Perfect Strangers.'
Lev Grossman
#90. You're dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway
Walt Disney Company
#91. What do you think of the Wilcoxes? Are they our sort? Are they likely people? Could they appreciate Helen, who is to my mind a very special sort of person? Do they care about Literature and Art? That is most important when you come to think of it. Literature and Art. Most important. How
E. M. Forster
#92. 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
#93. Whenever you're trying to do your own take on a classic piece of literature, it's almost like you're trying to swim up your own stream or drive down your own path.
Joel Edgerton
#94. Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.
Rita Dove
#95. Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#96. For when you looked into my mother's eyes you knew, as if He had told you, why God sent her into the world - it was to open then minds of all who looked to beautiful thoughts. And that is the beginning and end of literature.
J.M. Barrie
#97. 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
#98. If you cannot be a sun that illuminates the light, be a moon that never tires of reflecting the light.
Subhan Zein
#99. I left school at 16 but I wish I'd gone to university - I think I would have studied English literature. I had a knack for that. But I don't think you have the kind of wisdom at 16 to make that decision.
Brendan Coyle
#100. I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.
Pete Hamill
