Literature Quotes

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The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Barbara W. Tuchman

If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people.

John Jay Chapman

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life. (It has always struck me as strange, by the way, that Alfred Nobel did not institute a philosophy prize, or for that matter that he instituted a physics prize but not a mathematics prize, to say nothing of a music prize - music is, after all, more universal than literature, which is bound to a particular language.) The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.

That great Cham of literature, Samuel Johnson.

Tobias Smollett

A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper — whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

Sarah Orne Jewett

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

Lawrence Durrell

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

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

Juan Ramón Jiménez

"What is this romance?" she mused.
"Ah, that's the question. I've never come across a definition that satisfied me, though there are some very good ones"—he glanced in the direction of his books.
"It's not altogether knowing the other person, perhaps—it's ignorance," she hazarded.
"Some authorities say it's a question of distance—romance in literature, that is—"
"Possibly, in the case of art. But in the case of people it may be—" she hesitated.

If I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one,

Arthur Conan Doyle

A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.

Simone de Beauvoir

Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.

I had another convulsion of pleasure when Yale made me a Doctor of Literature, because I was not competent to doctor anybody's literature but my own.

The only link between Literature and the Drama left to us in England at the present moment is the bill of the play.

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.

G. K. Chesterton

Some old poet's grand imagination is imposed on us as adamantine everlasting truth, and God's own word! Pythagoras says, truly enough, "A true assertion respecting God, is an assertion of God"; but we may well doubt if there is any example of this in literature.

Henry David Thoreau

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

Inequality may linger in the world of material things, but great music, great literature, great art and the wonders of science are, and should be, open to all.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings... it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes in literature.