Literature Quotes

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

Virginia Woolf

A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured.

Henry David Thoreau

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

Aristotle

Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.

Thomas Carlyle

We are apt to imagine that this hubbub of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle. But if a man sleeps soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn.

Henry David Thoreau

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

Oscar Wilde

Every cloud engenders not a storm

William Shakespeare

Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't.

Christopher Hitchens

Sweet flowers are slow and weeds make haste

William Shakespeare

What the cinema can do better than literature or the spoken drama is to be fantastic.

Aldous Huxley

They had no conversation together, no intercourse but what the commonest civility required. Once so much to each other! Now nothing! There had been a time, when of all the large party now filling the drawing-room at Uppercross, they would have found it most difficult to cease to speak to one another. With the exception, perhaps, of Admiral and Mrs. Croft, who seemed particularly attached and happy, (Anne could allow no other exception even among the married couples) there could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so simliar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become aquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.

Jane Austen

It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

Mark Twain

Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.

Ernest Hemingway

Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered

Virginia Woolf

Some old poet's grand imagination is imposed on us as adamantine everlasting truth, and God's own word! Pythagoras says, truly enough, A true assertion respecting God, is an assertion of God; but we may well doubt if there is any example of this in literature.

Henry David Thoreau

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.

Oscar Wilde

I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.

Leo Tolstoy

Writing a book is like having a very long illness.-- George OrwellNot. -- Scott Archer Jones

George Orwell

Reporters used to be blue-collar at the Globe now, it's practically required that you have a trust fund.

Howie Carr

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

Virginia Woolf