Faith is a question of eyesight; even the blind can see that.

How does one say something new and not retell?

Kanuni za fasihi ndiyo msingi wa maandiko yote ya kitaalamu hapa ulimwenguni. Watu hawana budi kuzifuata kanuni hizo kama wanataka kutumia vipaji vyao katika ngazi ya kimataifa.

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then...

Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.

We rely upon the poets, the philosophers, and the playwrights to articulate what most of us can only feel, in joy or sorrow. They illuminate the thoughts for which we only grope; they give us...

Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as...

En el muro de Facebook hay una opción que te permite añadir “Me gusta” al comentario o la foto de otro internauta. El pictograma es una mano cerrada con el pulgar hacia arriba. También ofrece...

We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.

If you’re going to fall in love with anyone, fall in love with a writer. Allow yourself to become immortalised in words.

The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us...

There are some people about whom it is difficult to say anything which would describe them immediately and fully in their most typical and characteristic aspects; these are the people who are usually called “ordinary”...

There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

I can Control F to find words and phrases lost in a sea of literature, but why can’t I Control F to find one object among a hoarder’s clutter?

…but don’t tell me I’m not sensitive to beauty. That’s my Achilles’ heel, and don’t you forget it. To me, everything is beautiful. Show me a pink sunset and I’m limp, by God…

Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search...

Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It’s a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in...

How to explain the sheer tingling joy one experiences when two interesting, complex, and occasionally aggravating characters have at last settled their misunderstandings and will live happily ever after, no matter what travails life might...

I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken – and I’d...

Science has discovered that, like any work of literature, the human genome is a text in need of commentary, for what Eliot said of poetry is also true of DNA: ‘all meanings depend on the...

We work all our lives to be who we become. And, it’s who we become that determines what becomes of us.

In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment. Whether you write well or ill, be assured that you will not escape...

The rich don’t have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don’t do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody’s happy.

You stand for what is right-for the patient and the staff.Pressures of work may down you,maybe bent but not broken.

Actually, I am a coward. I say only what is safe to say, and I criticise only what is permissable to criticise.

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time...

And on top of that, my dad is a professor of literature so he’s very, very smart. So I was always thinking, ‘How I can aspire to be him?’ There was this intimidating aura growing...

Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.

Even if we try to conform to ideals and strive for perfection, we will always be pulled back to our core identity because it’s the path of least resistance for our souls – an energy...

Of four infernal rivers that disgorge/ Into the burning Lake their baleful streams;/Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate,/Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;/Cocytus, nam’d of lamentation loud/ Heard on the rueful stream; fierce...

It’s the best way of telling the truth; it’s a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that … [it’s] delight in, and play with,...

You’re like, both like, Alexander the Great.’We can’t both be Alexander.’Well sometimes I think you’re two side of the same coin, and I’m the metal in between.

So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea.

…This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events, only experience will answer.

…but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales.

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent

In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.

Yet when books have been read and reread, it boils down to the horse, his human companion, and what goes on between them.

Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age...

You must remember that no one lives a life free from pain and suffering.

Literary works are not democracies. We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We may, but the country of Novels, Etc., doesn’t. In that faraway place, no character...

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

I’ve always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

We were supposed to be an English literature class, but Miss Nesbitt used literature to teach real life. She said she didn’t have time to teach us like a regular English teacher–we were too far...

He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes; and...

You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as ROBINSON CRUSOE never was written, and never will be...

My theory on literature is an author who does not indulge in trashiness-writes about people you could introduce into your own home…he did not care to read a book or go to a play about...

The capital … shall form a fund, the interest of which shall be distributed annually as prizes to those persons who shall have rendered humanity the best services during the past year. … One-fifth to...

There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.

This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy…. his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and “The Wind in the Willows”–big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children’s book....