I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.

Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I’ve no regrets.

I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.

Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. Reckless O soul, exploring. I with thee and thou with me. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared go. And we will risk the...

When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien’s innumerable heirs. Call it ‘epic’, or ‘high’, or ‘genre’...

Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in...

Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don’t be like the book-snobs who won’t do that. Read sometimes for the words – the language. Don’t be like the play-it-safers that won’t do that. But when you...

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self…. What I have instead...

Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

I never thought I’d fall madly in love with literature.

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated...

Literature is air, and I’m suffocating in mediocrity.

O love, O fire! once he drewWith one long kiss my whole soul throughMy lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.

I looked into the literature on this,” said Nightingale, “and it wasn’t very helpful.””There’s a literature about this?””You’d be amazed, Constable, about what there’s a literature on.

In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas. ‘We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes...

Tanrı’ya karşı olduğumu sanma, dedi. Tanrı’ya inancım tamdır. Yalnız cennet ve cehenneme inanmıyorum işte. İnsanları aptal yerine koyup onları öbür dünyada cennete, ya da cehenneme gideceklerini söylemek bence saçmalığın en büyüğü.

Özgürlük, özgürlüğü için her gün mücadele edenin hakkıdır.

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent...

Sence and Sensibility, for instance, came out in three separate volumes, as did Pride and Prejudice (so the next time you read one of the ubiquitous time-travel Austen adaptations and somebody picks up a single-volume...

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?” asked Mrs. Dodypol. “It depends,” says I, “how much you used the dictionary before you read it.

Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.

To sense the peace of extinguished passionHappiness in not knowing the ultimate knowledge

Dreams are our only geography—our native land.

They are both spectacular, Life and death.

I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in Beginnings, and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of ‘deconstruction’ or ‘postmodernism’ was applied...

In every sound, the hidden silence sleeps.

A star needs a star.

To accomplish the perfect perfection, a little imperfection helps.

Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?

Your head is a lit chamber.

The world is a fairy tale; we are its guardians.

But it seems to me inevitable that any person who gives thoughtful and imaginative attention to literature must be awakened in his sensibilities, enlarged in his sympathies, sharpened in his critical faculties.

And literature frequently rises to heights that make it international.

Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.

I had never kissed a boy, had never even considered that I might enjoy such an unclean thing, until literature opened my eyes.

Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the eyes above the cant of the ‘language of Shakespeare’… sufficiently to realise the...

A great book allows me to leap over that wall: in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness, I feel human and unalone.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

The literature hardly helps. You remember it only when you are well, healthy, and in a positive state of mind. And you tend to blame your circumstances and people around you for the outcome of...

Resta-nos esclarecer a parte que nesse golfo fantástico cabe ao imaginário indireto, ou seja, o conjunto de imagens que a cultura nos fornece, seja ela cultura de massa ou outra forma de tradição. Esta questão...

Zola’nın italyan kökeni bile bir aşağılama nedeni olur. Bir gazeteci “Yarı-İtalyan, çeyrek Yunan, çeyrek Fransız, üç-dört kez kırma, hiç de güzel bir insanlık örneği değil!” diye yazar.

… I don’t know what to say.’‘That’s okay. Sometimes talking is like singing in a storm.’‘Like when you’re scared?’‘Exactly.’‘Or when you’re sad?’‘That too. A voice can be reassuring.

They were readers for whom literature was a drug, each complex plot line delivering a new high, suspending them above reality, allowing them a magical crossover…They had spoken often, with rueful honesty, of how the...

You can’t memorize poetry and stay a fake. Sooner or later, you start to understand what these poets are saying, and it makes you feel life has something quite special, with certain layers of meaning...

Bu iki rahibenin bana Katolik olup olmadığımı sormadıklarına bu nedenle memnun olmuştum. Sorsalardı, konuşmamız berbat olmazdı, ama ben de herhalde farklı davranırdım.

Eles não podem agir de outra maneira, os senhores da criação. O privilégio da criação lhes é irrenunciável. Nós, mulheres, temos que ser criaturas, sim, e criaturas perfeitas. Sejamos agradecidas aos cavaleiros suecos, principalmente ao...

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

Il (Georges Perros) arrivait le mardi matin, ébouriffé de vent et de froid sur sa moto bleue et rouillée. Voûté, dans un caban marine, la pipe à la bouche ou dans sa main. Il vidait...