And with distance in time it is the same as with distance in place. The imagination has its atmosphere and its sunlight as well as the earth has; only its mists are even more gorgeous...

But whatever the exact psychology of the process {receiving recognition or literary success}, the present has a way of contaminating the past. And the writing will change accordingly. Turmoil and dilemma once experienced with a...

The past is not another country; it is another life. The texture of daily living is different now than in the past, more different the further back we look, until we find people whose experiences...

For thy sweet love remembr’d such wealth bringsThat then, I scorn to change my state with kings.

The books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is,...

Bob, I am grateful for yourThree letter name.It’s another reminder of homeOf a world predictableOf a life I had.

Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature

PLATITUDE, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A fossil sentiment in...

I think that I had better go, Holmes.””Not a bit, doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell.

Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there...

The true elitists in the literary world are the ones who have become annoyed by literary ambition in any form, who have converted the very meaning of ambition so totally that it now registers as...

Bütün insanların ölümlü olduğunu biliyordu, günün birinde kendisi de teslim olacaktı. Ancak günün birinde; şimdi değil. Günün birinde ölmek korkunç bir şey değildi hemen şimdi ölmekti korkunç olan. Niçin? Çünkü nasıl olacaktı? Daha sonrası neydi?...

Her ağaç için bir kuş vardır.

At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.

To have all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern taskmasters they had been at school, was a most novel and delightful effect.

If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which...

I am the shore and the ocean, awaiting myself on both sides.

It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem.

Pose your questions to people and you will get countless useless answers.

With me: one minus one = one; with you: it’s zero. Here lies the only difference.

From nothing comes everything.

When all is lost, there is still a memory.

Senses empower limitations, senses expand vision within borders, senses promote understanding through pleasure.

Whatever others may say, they say it to deceive and comfort themselves, not help you.

In the lie of truth lies the truth.

Real geniuses would like that what we think of ourselves is true.

If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people — a very few people, but a few novelists are among them...

Darkness crept through. Shadows pried at doors, teased dull edges of recollections that never quite took hold. Memories that would have shriveled under the blinding sun of daylight. And reason.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where...

Death is the Inevitable Price We Must Pay.

She took a deep breath, “Last chance. Are you in need of rescuing?” His expression turned very strange, almost as if she’d struck him, “yes,” he said finally. -Tana and Gavriel-page chapter 5

When I work, I’m just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that’s not familiar. But I’m not trying to manipulate reality....

Çok içen insanların yanında ayık kalmak her zaman faydalıdır. Her şeyden önce dilinizi bağlar, fazla gevezelik etmezsiniz. Daha da güzeli insanın kendi kusur ve yanlışlarını örtebilmesidir, nasılsa kimsenin sizi kimsenin sizi görecek hali olmaz. Zira...

This ferry was taken over by the Yumas and operated for them by a man named Callaghan, but within days it was burned and Callaghan’s headless body floated anonymously downriver, a vulture standing between the...

Inequality was the price of civilization.

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain,...

Literature simply becomes richer after you’ve been fired, rejected, stranded, or had to change a few midnight diapers.

Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the...

Hat im 20. Jahrhundert irgendein anderer Roman so nachhaltig gewirkt wie”Pippi Langstrumpf”?

The Meadow… Only one of them succeeded in making a life here… He weathered. Before a backdrop of natural beauty, he lived a life from which everything was taken but a place. He lived so...

Considering that the modern and contemporary literature taught in most universities is largely bleak, cynical, morbid, pessimistic, misanthropic dogmatism, often written by suicidal types who sooner or later kill themselves with alcohol or drugs, or...

Knowing that others want to read my writing is the greatest inspiration to write.

If [literature] should turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society will slip back into the sty of the immediate — which is to say, the memoryless existence of hymenoptera and gastropods. None of this...

Imagine that the genome is a book.There are twenty-three chapters, called CHROMOSOMES.Each chapter contains several thousand stories, called GENES.Each story is made up of paragraphs, called EXTONS, which are interrupted by advertisements called INTRONS.Each paragraph...

When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you’re going to...

I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually...

I wish I’d known those words on the day I watched those German troops land, plane-load after plane-load of them—and come off ships down in the harbor! All I could think of was damn them,...

I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.

Gıli Gıli duygularını yumuşatmak için balkondaki kırık kiremitlerin arasına sakladığı ojesini çıkarıp defalarca soludu. Oje kokusu ruhuna yayıldıkça gövdesi hafifledi.

The ”text” is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.