Literature Quote Quotes

“... so this is for us.
This is for us who sing, write, dance, act, study, run and love
and this is for doing it even if no one will ever know
because the beauty is in the act of doing it.
Not what it can lead to.
This is for the times I lose myself while writing, singing, playing
and no one is around and they will never know
but I will forever remember
and that shines brighter than any praise or fame or glory I will ever have,
and this is for you who write or play or read or sing
by yourself with the light off and door closed
when the world is asleep and the stars are aligned
and maybe no one will ever hear it
or read your words
or know your thoughts
but it doesn’t make it less glorious.
It makes it ethereal. Mysterious.
Infinite.
For it belongs to you and whatever God or spirit you believe in
and only you can decide how much it meant
and means
and will forever mean
and other people will experience it too
through you.
Through your spirit. Through the way you talk.
Through the way you walk and love and laugh and care
and I never meant to write this long
but what I want to say is:
Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourself
and let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story.
Let your very identity be your book.
Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody.

So go create. Take photographs in the wood, run alone in the rain and sing your heart out high up on a mountain
where no one will ever hear
and your very existence will be the most hypnotising scar.
Make your life be your art
and you will never be forgotten.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

“Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourself
and let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story.
Let your very identity be your book.
Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“What is this thing? trading passions for a tiny bit of acceptance.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“He is our man's-man of literature.”
― Andrew Barger, Edgar Allan Poe Annotated and Illustrated Entire Stories and Poems

“Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say,There! That's the truth!”
― Urusla K. Le Guin

“Richard Alther's Bedside Matters offers readers an insightful and moving end-of-life narrative in the spirit of Paul Harding's Tinkers and William Gaddis's Agapē Agape. Challenged by physical decline and family intrigue, Walter transcends his corporeal prison to find larger meaning in art, philosophy, and literature. A work of depth, carefully wrought with nuance and delicately wrapped in wisdom and humor, Bedside Matters serves up a worthy exploration of and an antidote to the shortcomings of our material age. — Jacob M. Appel, author of Millard Salter's Last Day.”
― Jacob Appel

“Good literature is a lifeboat! Every time you feel you are sinking, jump on it!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Literature under despotism:

“The personality of the artist should develop freely and without restraint. One thing, however, we demand: acknowledgement of our creed.” - Dr. Rosenberg, Minister of Culture – Third Reich

“Every artist has the right to create freely; but we, Communists, must guide him according to plan.” - Lenin

pg. 7”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature

“Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls,'" he's saying, bending over to gaze down into the deli case. His breath is fogging the glass. I'm watching it suddenly. Watching him. "'He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart-'"
"'Liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes,'" I say, and I'm sure I sound a little stunned. I'm not used to boys coming into the deli to quote some of my favorite modernist literature. Even I can't resist that. A boy like him, who, from the first moment, seems to love the things I love.”
― Phoebe North, Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food & Love

“Fueled by the need to interpret the past, to explore the present, and to imagine the future, each generation shapes the world of books.”
― Pawan Mishra

“Dante is certainly not, as one sometimes hears said, vindictive, spiteful, sadistic. He is not merely engaged in score settling with old adversaries by assigning them to hell. The punishments in hell are horribly cruel, but the world in which he lived was horribly cruel. He had been sentenced to death both by burning and decapitation. Such sentences were almost routine. We think of the modern world as more civilised than his, but who could seriously argue that this is so, bearing in mind events on the world stage in the twentieth century?”
― Prue Shaw

“I have a weakness for Catherine. Because she was the first of my heroines, and also because I invented her story, whereas "Marianne, a Star for Napoleon" was a command given to me by my Publisher for the bicentenary of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.”
― Juliette Benzoni

“Fate is a cunning hussy”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters: Volume 1

“La buena literatura es un arte que alimenta el alma.”
― Anonymous

“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, The Railwayman's Wife

“Literature is an invitation to people to discover the world of others and the world of others is the best source to understand and to improve our own world!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“According to the scientist, time is interminable and inexhaustible. The artist is more inclined to relate the passage of time as a subject involving the randomness of memory and humankind’s ability to create vivid recollections. Astute artists depict collections of disjointed thought fragments in paintings and literature in order to stir the pot of human consciousness. Art rests upon the correspondence between the impact of external experience and the finiteness of human life. An artist attempts to articulate answers to the mystery of being by rendering a thoughtful interpretation of the world that we occupy and experience through our senses.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Para aquel que roba, o pide prestado un libro y a su dueño no lo devuelve, que se le mude en sierpe la mano y lo desgarre. Que los gusanos de los libros le roan las entrañas como lo hace el remordimiento que nunca cesa”
― Manguel Alberto