Elegir significar determinar los fines de acuerdo con la razón. Tomar decisiones era sólo escoger entre los deseos de un muestrario concebido por el apetito propio o ajeno, casi siempre ajeno

Words have the power to make things true if they’re said right.

escapist” literature. As I understand it, the adjective implies, a little condescendingly, that the life therein depicted cannot be identified with the real life which the critic knows so well in W.C.1: and may even...

Bizi mutlu kılan yaşama düzeyimiz değil, duyuş, hayata bakış açımızdır.

I look around and see that many — not all, but many — problems we’ve got could be solved if our culture simply fostered the habit of reading. Reading books of science, philosophy, history. Reading...

I have always lusted after a sepia-toned library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a sliding ladder. I fantasie about Tennessee Williams’ types of evenings involving rum on the porch. I long for balmy slightly sleepless nights...

It is the custom on the stage in all good, murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes in as regular alternation as the layers of red and white in a side of...

[P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally. Everything we hear and see we need...

It is beautiful to express love and even more beautiful to feel it.

You don’t know anything, but I know even less.

Some people complain there are too many people on earth, Some people complain about secret societies, Some people accuse others of not being able to wake up early. Almost all people complain about something.

From one bell all the bells toll.

There is a pledge of the big and of the small in the infinite.

Nothing reminds us of an awakening more than rain.

They will smile, as they always do when they plan a major attack late in the night.

Strangers are endearing because you don’t know them yet.

Do not look too far for you will see nothing.

The universe is God’s son.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

There comes a hush between darkness and day.Like expectation of a caress.A murmur of silence. Tree crests peeked down at Paulette through slowly lifting fog. Bark felt around for its texture again. Morning gathered and...

Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.

In all ages woman has been the source of all that is pure, unselfish, and heroic in the spirit and life of man…..poetry and fiction are based upon woman’s love, and the movements of history...

Maybe it was that nearly everyone else was dead and she felt a little bit dead too, but she figured that even a vampire deserved to be saved. Maybe she ought to leave him, but...

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

Fotoğrafı kaldırmaya isteksiz görünüyordu; bir müddet daha, oyalanırcasına onu gözümün önünde tuttu. Yeniden cüzdanına koyduktan sonra, bu defa cebinden Hopalang Cassidy adlı eski bir kitap çıkardı “Şuna bir bak, bunu çocukken hiç elinden düşürmezdi. Daha...

A picture with one word on it is like a thousand-and-one-word piece of literature. At this rate, I should be done with my million-word novel in about 999 minutes.

A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but...

Onlar göze aldıklarına göre, ben de göze alacağım. Gerçeği söyleyeceğim, çünkü kendisine kurala uygun olarak başvurulan adaletin bunu eksiksiz olarak yapmaması durumunda, söyleyeceğime söz verdim. Benim görevim konuşmak, suç ortağı olmak istemiyorum. Yoksa gecelerim orada,...

If you`re wondering how you`ll find time, it means you don`t really want to read. Because nobody`s ever got time. Children certainly haven`t, nor have teenagers or grown-ups. Life always gets in the way. Time...

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter in all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us...

I grow weary of the loveThat lasts for a nightWhen it should be thereThe next sunrise

Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what...

La emoción trágica, efectivamente, es una cara que mira en dos direcciones: hacia el terror y hacia la piedad, y ambos son fases de ella. Habrás visto que uso la palabra paraliza. Quiero decir que...

The castle? The monster? The man of learning? I only just thought of it. Surely you know that just as the momentous events of the past cast their shadows down the ages, so now, when...

The poet must always, in every instance, have the vibrant word… that by it’s trenchancy can so wound my soul that it whimpers…. One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret...

This view of literature as an aesthetic object that could make us ‘better people’ is linked to a certain idea of the subject, to what theorists have come to call ‘the liberal subject’, the individual...

(from his random observations after reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens)In the Old Curiosity Shop I discovered that in the character of Dick Swiveller, Dickens provided P.G. Wodehouse with pretty much the whole of his...

Należymy do gatunku składającego słowa jak ryba ikrę, produkujemy więcej kultury, niż jesteśmy w stanie przetrawić. W ciągu ostatnich lat pedantycznie zwalczaliśmy graffiti na stacjach metra, a jednocześnie wydajemy miliony koron na budowę nowych bibliotek...

Luckily, my job demands constant reading, otherwise I’d have to figure out some other excuse.

Biladerlerim, kardeşlerim, kankalar! Kolera’dan uluslararası hırsızlık madalyası kazanmış bir düzine hünerli gaftici çıktı. Bu şahsiyetlerin “Saat kaç kardeş?” dedikleri insanlar, ömür boyu saatsiz dolaştılar.

Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.

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.

He who does not know how to look back at where he came from will never get to his destination.

In French culture, the best way of buying time or getting off the hook entirely in a thorny personal situation is to claim that it’s complicated. The French did not invent love, but they did...

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

I’m interested in things women do that aren’t spoken about. Manto’s stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster.

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