Literature Quotes

The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction.

Oakley Hall

Inequility is the price of civilization.

George Orwell

Nobody could catch cold by the sea; nobody wanted appetite by the sea; nobody wanted spirits; nobody wanted strength. Sea air was healing, softening, relaxing -- fortifying and bracing -- seemingly just as was wanted -- sometimes one, sometimes the other. If the sea breeze failed, the seabath was the certain corrective; and where bathing disagreed, the sea air alone was evidently designed by nature for the cure.

Jane Austen

In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

S. I. Hayakawa

In literature imitations do not imitate

Mark Twain

Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.

Terry Pratchett

Dream by making and make by dreaming.

Dejan Stojanovic

I cannot tell what the dickens his name is

William Shakespeare

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

Neil Gaiman

Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.

George Steiner

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

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

Oscar Wilde

There is something perfect to be found in the imperfect: the law keeps balance through the juxtaposition of beauty, which gains perfection through nurtured imperfection.

Dejan Stojanovic

About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

Virginia Woolf

A word only writes Its night and ridesIts dream.

Dejan Stojanovic

The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes connot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog. Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality... in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

C.S. Lewis

The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.

C.S. Lewis

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.

Christopher Hitchens

O homem que não lê não tem nenhuma vantagem sobre o homem que não sabe ler.

Mark Twain

Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature

Ralph Waldo Emerson