Von allen Abenteuern ist Selbstmord das literarischste, mehr noch als Mord.

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.1010 One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature to realize...

I’ll be your Dostoevsky, if you’ll be my Tolstoy. Our life together will be so full of despair that death will be like a gulag full of joy.

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

Harrogate saw them going along Blount Avenue Sunday morning. They wore outfits all cut from the same bolt of cloth and in the church pew standing six across they looked like a strip of gaudy...

I wish the military were the militerary. Less fighting and more reading.

There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.

I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.

No institution of learning of Ingersoll’s day had courage enough to confer upon him an honorary degree; not only for his own intellectual accomplishments, but also for his influence upon the minds of the learned...

Sunday is the golden clasp that binds together the volume of the week.

Basketbol takımındakiler birbirlerini tutuyor, Katolikler birbirlerini tutuyor, lanet entellektüeller birbirlerini tutuyor, Ayın Kitabı Kulübüne üye olan herifler bile birbirlerini tutuyor.

Language can’t describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader’s interpretation is equally valid, more important than the author’s intention. In fact, nothing in life has meaning. Reality is subjective. Values...

Everyone in this tale has a rock-solid hamartia: hers, that she is so sick; yours, that you are so well. Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed,...

As usual, it struck me that letters were the only really satisfactory form of literature. They give one the facts so amazingly, don’t they? I felt when I got to the end that I’d lived...

Be a reader for a lifetime. Read, read more!

When your share your story with someone, it becomes their story too.

I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.

Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly.

My dis-interest in what people speak of as “women’s problems,” “women’s literature.” Have women a special sensibility? No. There are individuals uniquely talented & uniquely equipped to interpret the complex symbolism of the world but...

Aynanın karşısında yumuşak, seri ve ağırbaşlı bir hareketle Arap Sado’nun yadigarı muhteşem sustalıyı açtı. Gençliğini bir süre daha ayna karşısında seyredip sustalıyı bileklerine indirdi!

… endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence that was drawing to an end towards that...

Yet Katie held fast to the dream that perhaps there were men in the world who appreciated good women – men capable of loving a woman enough to die for her.Something had to inspire the...

One night I begged Robin, a scientist by training, to watch Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ with me on PBS. He lasted about one act, then turned to me in horror: ‘This is how...

Remember, nothing happens before it’s supposed to, so trust that, as you are striving for authenticity and personal excellence, the recognition of your life’s purpose is nearing closer.

So much of life is invisible, inscrutable: layers of thoughts, feelings, outward events entwined with secrecies, ambiguities, ambivalences, obscurities, darknesses strongly present even to the one who’s lived it- maybe especially to the one who’s...

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

Gulliver was soon being read “from the cabinet council to the nursery”.

Dead parents are gruesome, yes, but anyone who’s anyone in children’s literature has either been orphaned or abandoned; well-adjusted kids from stable two-parent homes don’t go on hero quests.

Spend the glittering moonlight therePursuing down the soundless deepLimbs that gleam and shadowy hair,Or floating lazy, half-asleep.Dive and double and follow after,Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call,With lips that fade, and human laughterAnd faces...

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This...

My beloved isn’t dazzling light, Darkness is my beloved – The reason I’m so fond of her…

Camp fires, like red, peculiar blossoms, dotted the night.

It was his wedding day, and then it was any day; it was nothing, and then it was forever.

Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin.

Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company...

What a tribute this is to art; what a misfortune this is for history. (In reference to Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’)

And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference betweenTwo methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind,A testing of performing words, while heIs soaping a third...

Der Sommer hat angefangen und schon neigt er sich dem Ende zu.

Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.

Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see…...

The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.

Give at least fifteen minutes everyday to reading. Sometimes, we spend a lot of time watching television – surfing through channels; not really watching anything in particular. Fifteen minutes out of that time is not...

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly in hand before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

Hayat karışık, öyle karışıktı ki… Nereye dönerseniz dönün aynı karışıklık vardı.

Literature is a cake with many toys baked inside-and even if you find them all, if you don’t enjoy the path that leads you to them, it will be a hollow accomplishment. There was a...

In some literature, I’ve read, weather is used as a metaphor. The darker and stormier the weather outside the more diabolical the deeds done. When the clouds roll away, however, the rain has washed away...

Poirot, watching him, felt suddenly a doubt–an uncomfortable twinge. Was there, here, something that he had missed? Some richness of the spirit? Sadness crept over him. Yes, he should have become acquainted with the classics....

The art teacher’s scarlet book was called Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. ‘As the title suggests,’ Mr Dunwoody saw the book’d caught my attention, ‘it’s about the history of opticians. What are you...