There are no clear borders, Only merging invisible to the sight.

Those who hate rain hate life.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Is that all?

Christ did not ask or want to be what he was not.

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

Poetry, Shakespeare and opera, are like mumps and should be caught when young. In the unhappy event that there is a postponement to mature years, the results may be devastating.

It’s your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.

Nevertheless, the potential and actual importance of fantastic literature lies in such psychic links: what appears to be the result of an overweening imagination, boldly and arbitrarily defying the laws of time, space and ordered...

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if...

please,Tana,please.’ -lots of characters in The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Gazing from the moon, we see one earth, without borders, Mother Earth, her embrace encircling one people, humankind.

The mythic voice rising from literature and art allows us to be humane. We are not humane because of political power, or education, or even religion. We are humane because we recognize the humanity of...

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

Literature is the question without the answer. Philosophy is the answer without the question.

I asked my publisher what would happen if he sold all the copies of my book he’d printed. He said “I’ll just print another ten.

She’s the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She’s the self-made girl!(…)Well, to begin with, the self-made girl’s a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn’t self-made at...

I always thought it was Mo Be Dick. I know Mo, and he is a dick.

I carry my liberty with me. It is in my thoughts, in my head. Shakespeare is one of my countries, Goethe another. You can change that badge that I wear, but you can’t change the...

Life was transparent, literature opaque. Life was open, literature a closed system. Life was composed of things, literature of words. Life was what it appeared to be: if you were afraid your plane would crash...

Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody’s wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.

Too many writers are trying to write with too shallow an education. Whether they go to college or not is immaterial…a good writer needs a sense of the history of literature to be successful as...

I don’t believe in ONE holy book. I believe all books are holy. Of course, some books are holy shit.

Dear family,I am drafting a new laundry protocol for better and more considerate usage of the washing machine

YOUR BOREDOM IS YOUR PROBLEM,” said Owen Meany. “IT’S YOUR LACK OF IMAGINATION THAT BORES YOU. HARDY HAS THE WORLD FIGURED OUT. TESS IS DOOMED. FATE HAS IT IN FOR HER. SHE’S A VICTIM; IF...

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.

But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an...

the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these...

There are books so alive that you’re always afraid that while you weren’t reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too,...

Because of literature we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings.

Now we’re guests in a faraway land nearly 40 years on. No trees, no cool breeze, no best friends. Only endless days spent in sending SMSs…

What makes Geoffrey Chaucer such compelling reading is his creation of a riveting conversation between the ideal and the everyday.

As girls, we will do anything for the person whom we love. We will scale buildings in the rain or run through fire if it means saving our love’s life. There is absolutely nothing more...

The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.

eloquence.” A few centuries later, Saint Augustine wrestled with the value of eloquence, associating it with his pagan background and training in Greek rhetoric while simultaneously employing it winsomely in his Christian writings. Such suspicion...

A fortress built long ago,Walls made timeless by historic glory.The small girl in the boat slows,To listen to its story.

Understand is not the word; you are right, you can never really ‘understand’ about someone, anyone, even yourself. It is best to believe in them as human; feel that they are alive like you and...

The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

Ô, wine!, the truth-serum so potent that all those who wish to live happy lives should abstain from drinking it entirely!… except of course when they are alone.

It was. It will never be again. Remember.

have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and...

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is...

What is needed is the imagination of the poet and the reasoning power of the mathematician. The thief of “The Purloined Letter” successfully hides the letter from the police because he is both a poet...

Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one’s wall, even if for only a moment, a moment before one immures...

For my part, I love to give myself up to the illusion of poetry. A hero of fiction that never existed is just as valuable to me as a hero of history that existed a...

the glory of the protagonist is always paid for by a lot of secondary characters

My soul is in the sky.

This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a...

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of...

The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to...

The only problem i had with literature that I simply couldn’t figure out was that the correct answer was the first thing that comes to your mind after reading the question, the most obvious one....