4,370 Quotes About Literature

Earth is the source of light.

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do,' Arkadian Porpirych says. 'What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastime, without risks.

An unhappy ending makes it literature rather than romantic fiction.

There's just one thing: how can I make a compact with the earth evermore? I don't kiss the earth, I don't tear open her bosom; what should I do, become a peasant or a shepherd? I keep going and I don't know; have I gotten into stench and shame, or into light and joy? That's the whole trouble, because everything on earth is a riddle.

Good literature boils down to two things: How interesting is the story you are telling, and how interesting is your telling.

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

What we call life is only talk of nature.

সাহিত্য বিশ্বরহস্যের একটি পরম রহস্য। সাহিত্য শ্রদ্ধার বস্তু, সাহিত্য পবিত্রতার প্রতীক, সাহিত্য-চিরন্তনের বাহক। ‘কবিতা অমৃত, আর কবিরা অমর।

One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about.