4,370 Quotes About Literature

Let’s call this a kiss and assume that, in reality, a kiss is as much a beginning of dramatic events as a wise decision is in Greek tragedy.

Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.

ಪಾತ್ರಗಳಿಗೆ ಉದ್ದೇಶವಿರುತ್ತದೆ, ಆದರೆ ಕಥನಕ್ಕೇ ಉದ್ದೇಶವಿರಬಾರದು.

Lots of writers are fascinated by evil and write copiously about it, but they are bored by virtue; this not only limits their scope but prevents a satisfactory account of evil, which can no more be comprehended apart from good than light can be comprehended apart from darkness.

I'm not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus... Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one.

Has anyone ever written a great novel about a woman who is happy in her marriage? Of course, most protagonists are unhappy. But heroes are mostly unhappy for existential reasons; heroines suffer for social reasons, because of male power, because of men.

When I left, I took everything with me...I reached under my bed where there were two leather-bound journals that had gold lettering on the front covers and that fastened with a flimsy lock. I read the lettering out loud to myself and gingerly placed the books into my backpack. Diary.

We were magical and alive - we cared about music and conversation, sex and spit and blood, holding on tight to the space between youth and adulthood. When I look back at that time, my nostalgia can be blinding. Because we weren’t night dwellers, vampires who would live forever. We were a bunch of kids playing at being Lost Boys, looking for our version of Neverland.

Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.