En yakın arkadaşım, Matriyona yoktu artık… Son gününde bir kazak yüzünden nasılda azarlamıştım!

Adlar daima insana dert oluyordu. Hayat ve zevkler değişir ama adlar kalır.

Literature cannot be imposed; it must be discovered.

Through books I discovered everything to be loved, explored, visited, communed with. I was enriched and given all the blueprints to a marvelous life, I was consoled in adversity, I was prepared for both joys...

And that was the point of children, thought Caroline Meddey: to bind us to the earth and to the present, to distract us from death.

In a myriad of ways you tell one truth.

New Rome will be destroyedBy the attacks of new vandals.God always remains silent.

Creators of history always play with our impotence and our ignorance.

Creating means living.

When everything hurries everywhere, nothing goes anywhere.

To go where no one else has ever gone before is the secret of heroism.

Even great men bow before the Sun; it melts hubris into humility.

I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched...

Either you will be you or you will not be at all.

Eternity is a glorious word, but eternity is ice.

You can’t enjoy art or books in a hurry.

…what distinguishes pulp fiction from great literature is how emphatically the work challenges us to interpret it.

It was wonderful flirting with him, all the razor-edged literary banter, like Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. A battle of wit, and a test, too.

The cinema, as literature, as all the plastic arts, do not exist outside of a critical system that allows us to study them.

If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.

Keep going’ she told herself, ‘Don’t look back.’ But she looked anyways.

People don’t read to enlighten themselves or seek to gain some valuable insight into their own psychology. People read to escape.

Medeniyet yok oluyor” diye bağırdı Tom öfkeyle, “Ben artık bu konuda karamsarım. Şu Goddard denen adamın yazdığı The Rise of the Coloured Empires adlı kitabı okudun mu?

It (the selection of Jelinek) has done irreparable damage to the Nobel literature prize, both those who came before Elfriede Jelinek and those who came after her.

She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman’s beauty is a treasure beyond price.

What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place.

Books, books, books!I had found the secret of a garret roomPiled high with cases in my father’s name;Piled high, packed large,–where, creeping in and outAmong the giant fossils of my past,Like some small nimble mouse...

In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose.

Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor! Oh! worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment.

Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following...

For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints.

What is literature, and why do I try to write about it? I don’t know. Likewise, I don’t know why I go on living, most of the time. But this not knowing is precisely what...

I do think that part of literature’s job is to comment on and participate in the social issues of the time.

A good story will always outlive the truth.

It didn’t help that I was never allowed to study anything remotely contemporary until the last year of university: there was never any sense of that leading to this. If anything, my education gave me...

He whom the gods love dies young.

The re-evaluation and rediscovery of minority art (including the cultural minority of women) is often conceived as a matter of remedying injustice and exclusiveness through doing justice to individual artists by allowing their work into...

Thus like a Captive in an Isle confin’d,Man walks at large, a Pris’ner of the Mind

Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do...

In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus...

Recognize that you have been chosen to be alive, right now, at this exact moment in time and know that none of that is random. There is something about you, your past or your future...

Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.

Which is probably one of the reasons those of us who love contemporary fiction love it as we do. We’re alone with it. It arrives without references, without credentials we can trust. Givers of prizes...

When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves.

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

Allein die Literatur erlaubt uns, mit dem Geist eines Toten in Verbindung zu treten, auf direkte, umfassendere und tiefere Weise, als das selbst in einem Gespräch mit einem Freund möglich wäre – denn so tief...

All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.

An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again.