Quotes on Literature

Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor.

On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men.

The history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the irruption of events in favor of stable structures.

Our lives are greatly enriched when we immerse ourselves in literature and spiritual writing, not because we are going to be tested but purely for the sake of enrichment.

If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls.

It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.

Follow what you are genuinely passionate about and let that guide you to your destination.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.

If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.

America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe.

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.

People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.

You don’t want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the present tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don’t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.

Literature has become my life.

The scientific observer of Nature is a kind of mystic seeker in the act of prayer.