Quotes on Literature

People aren't quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They're not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

In every parting there is an image of death.

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

If a man's fortune does not fit him, it is like the shoe in the story; if too large it trips him up, if too small it pinches him.

The only peace that can be made with a dictator is once that must be based on deterrence. For today, the dictator may be your friend, but tomorrow he will need you as an enemy.

Immortality: A toy which people cry for, And on their knees apply for, Dispute, contend and lie for, And if allowed Would be right proud Eternally to die for.

Free societies are societies in which the right of dissent is protected.

Duty - that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.