4,370 Quotes About Literature

Words, to me, are the same as an instrument is to a musician. I never know where this typewriter is going to take me until I begin. I never know what I'm feeling until I read over what I have written.

There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky.

Every day I would run to the library to get new books. Reading was a passion: I wanted to understand life. I read Dostoevsky and Brehm, Jules Verne and Turgenev, Dickens and the Zhivopisnoye Obozreniye; and the more I read, th emore I doubted everything. Lies surrounded me on all sides; one moment I wanted to run off to the Indian jungle, the next to throw a bomb at the governor-general's house on Tverskaya, the next to hang myself.

Even great men bow before the Sun; it melts hubris into humility.

Sun is a hearthstone, a merry-go-round of extinguished hearthstones.

The Moth and Its BelovedAsk the moth the beauty of the candle And it will burn without a confessionThere is a secret to its longing For it feels no fear or hesitationThe moth is too much in love with the flame Yet it does not appear under the sunFor the moon’s light is far too feeble, and It gave up on its pursuit of the sunJust a sight of a candle is enough To remind it of its real belovedSo it settles for that candle in reach, Revels in its heat, and asks to be burned

We bite back the things we can't say and we cushion every surface for the inevitable moment when they all come fighting out.

Find me, as time is a luxuryFor I wait, under this naïve moon

Ich war durch meine fürchterliche Situation gezwungen, diese Spaltung in ein Ich Schwarz und ein Ich Weiß zumindest zu versuchen, um nicht erdrückt zu werden von dem grauenhaften Nichts um mich.