Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can...

Literature for me was a magnificent destiny for which I was not yet fully prepared. 76

By and large the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic literature; formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange,...

…at the termination of a given passage of time…the hidden gate goes down…and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there...

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful.

Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out …

Like the ‘good’ characters in literature, the sane don’t have any memorable lines.

Bir insan, yaşayan her insan için olumsuz ve kuşku çekici bir şeyler bulabilir çünkü herkes bir şeyden suçludur ya da saklıyordur.

Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in...

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.” In a horror story, the victim keeps asking why – but there can be...

To hide feelings when you are near crying is the secret of dignity.

If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.

Nothing is inanimate; what is the rest is our interpretation.

Long ago we conquered our passions looking at ourselves in the mirror of eternity.

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?

He confided his deepest secret to you; be always wary of his secret.

We forget old stories, but those stories remain the same.

Absolute is a game with only one player where Absolute forgets itself so it would have a reason to fulfill the motion while returning.

How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who...

I shouted the perfect words to scare him off. It was just the delivery (and only the delivery) that made me sound like a twelve-year-old girl with pee running down her leg. I felt dirty...

I have hopein who I am becoming.I have belief in every scar and disgraceful wordI have ever spokenor been toldbecause it is still teaching meand I have hope in who I am becoming.They say it...

Did you think of anything when Miss Marcy said Scoatney Hall was being re-opened? I thought of the beginning of Pride and Prejudice – where Mrs. Bennet says ‘Netherfield Park is let a last.’ And...

Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look...

Time and death: It’s the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It’s just what’s there. It was not something I planned to do.

Amerikalıların ara sıra toprak kölesi olmayı istedikleri olur, ama köylü sınıfından olmaya karşı hep direnmişlerdir.

They began to come upon chains and packsaddles, singletrees, dead mules, wagons. Saddletrees eaten bare of their rawhide coverings and weathered white as bone, a light chamfering of miceteeth along the edges of the wood....

I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that George Orwell, in his second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter, published in 1935, had borrowed from Joyce for...

En sonra, birinci savaş konseyini, bir sanığa gizli kalan bir belgeye dayanarak hüküm giydirdiği için hukuku çiğnemekle suçluyorum. İkinci savaş konseyini de üstten gelen emre uyarak, bir suçluyu, suçunu bile bile temize çıkarıp ağır adli...

I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, it’s because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death. Searching for the word...

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...