Literature Quotes
120 literature quotes follow in order of popularity. Be sure to bookmark and share your favorite literature quotes!
"While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living."
-Cyril Connolly
-Cyril Connolly
"The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new."
-William Makepeace Thackeray
-William Makepeace Thackeray
"Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty."
-Herbert Gold
-Herbert Gold
"To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength."
-Lawrence Clark Powell
-Lawrence Clark Powell
"Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions."
-A. E. Housman
-A. E. Housman
"In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern."
-Amy Lowell
-Amy Lowell
"Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way round."
-David Lodge
-David Lodge
"What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering."
-Harold Bloom
-Harold Bloom
"Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart."
-Salman Rushdie
-Salman Rushdie
"It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave."
-Anatole Broyard
-Anatole Broyard
"Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty."
-Lionel Trilling
-Lionel Trilling
"There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature."
-Stephen Stills
-Stephen Stills
"The narrative was too constricted; it was like a fetus strangling on its own umbilical cord."
-John Gregory Dunne
-John Gregory Dunne
"What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power."
-John Cheever
-John Cheever
"Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity."
-Nelson Algren
-Nelson Algren
"When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language."
-James Earl Jones
-James Earl Jones
"Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism."
-Josef Skvorecky
-Josef Skvorecky
"Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world."
-John Cheever
-John Cheever
"One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work."
-Gloria Naylor
-Gloria Naylor
"Mr. Fitzgerald--I believe that is how he spells his name--seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home."
-Zelda Fitzgerald
-Zelda Fitzgerald
"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."
-E. M. Forster
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[quote] => What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
[q_id] => 601845
[author_name] => E. M. Forster
[next_name] => Living
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-E. M. Forster
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