Western Literature Quotes

#1. Western literature has been more influenced by the Bible than any other book.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#2. Practically every movie that shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western literature of the last 300 or 400 years, these are portrayed as awful figures.

Michael Novak

#3. A lot of my work comes from what in Asia is called the 'mind of wonder.' There is not a lot of 'mind of wonder' writing in contemporary Western literature. I think that's what appeals to the readers who are my fans.

Tom Robbins

#4. Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature.

Tayari Jones

#5. The defense of the great works of Western literature can no longer be undertaken by central institutional power though it is hard to see how the normal operation of learned institutions, including recruitment can manage without them.

Harold Bloom

#6. I look at western literature and especially North American literature, and I feel like it gets bogged down so much with all of that, with domestic stories and relationships and a woman dealing with the loss of her husband.

Miguel Syjuco

#7. There were no vampires of note in Western literature until about the 18th century. But they tell us where we park our anxieties, whether its over-powerful women, death or damnation. We make our own monsters.

Deborah Harkness

#8. 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

#9. Part of the reason I make things realistic is, I don't really want to have to explain my work. What I wish to communicate is done so people can make their own interpretation, and if it's different to my idea it doesn't matter.

Jane Alexander

#10. Cure the disease and kill the patient.

Francis Bacon

#11. Those were the good old days when educated Americans read foreign literature in translation, even works written in non-Western languages.

Minae Mizumura

#12. One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

George Saintsbury

#13. I robbed them, and I killed them as cold as ice, and I would do it again, and I know I would kill another person because I've hated humans for a long time.

Aileen Wuornos

#14. The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe. I fervently hope that my pursuit, as a Japanese, of literature and culture will, in some small measure, repay Western Europe for the light it has shed upon the human condition.

Kenzaburo Oe

#15. Well documented, the relationship of literature to myth in the Western world has undergone much change over the millennia, as first the age of gods fell away before the notion of a single god, and then, for many people, that single god slipped away, too.

Kate Bernheimer

#16. One of the things that writing and speech can do is express what we're thinking one thought at a time.

David Lipsky

#17. I am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail ghosts in my room.

Jean Rhys

#18. The East was no longer a threat to the western world, and when there's nothing to fear we turn our backs, we look elsewhere. Eastern literature is still the poor relative that everyone wants to forget, the Cinderella who hasn't (yet) found her prince.

Dumitru Tepeneag

#19. The divorced Indian lady combines every fantasy about the liberated, wicked Western woman with the safety net of basic submissive familiarity.

Bharati Mukherjee

#20. The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.

Harold Bloom

#21. Yet the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilization now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define.

Michel Houellebecq

#22. Having been an editor for more than a decade, I thought I had a good idea of how much work was involved in writing a novel. I was wrong! Writing is a lot harder than I ever imagined - but worth it.

Julie Klassen

#23. In 1935, Faber & Faber published an anthology entitled 'My Best Western Story' in which the genre's leading practitioners contributed what they considered their finest. Alas, literature the stories ain't; they appear more like fossils from a spent mine.

Clive Sinclair

#24. If a man has knocked out the teeth of a man of the same rank, his own teeth shall be knocked out.

Hammurabi

#25. This ferry was taken over by the Yumas and operated for them by a man named Callaghan, but within days it was burned and Callaghan's headless body floated anonymously downriver, a vulture standing between the shoulderblades in clerical black, silent rider to the sea.

Cormac McCarthy

#26. You all know what Class Seven does?" "You blow shit up," Travers supplied in a long-suffering voice that drew snickers from the rest of the group. "All kinds of shit," Everett growled with relish, the gleam returning to his eyes in full force.

Abigail Roux

#27. Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

Gustave Flaubert

#28. A liar is a liar and lives on the lies he tells and dies in a life of lies.

Carl Sandburg

#29. Walk through pain, face it, lay down in it and rest. Get up and walk again, repeat until you reach the end.

Juls Amor

#30. Literature - Eastern and Western - abounds with stories, myths, legends about the search for youth, for eternal life.

F. Sionil Jose

#31. American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.

Christopher Dawson