Literature Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

A copy of Dante's Purgatorio excited his especial disgust. "French, eh?" he said. "I guessed as much, and pretty dirty too, I shouldn't wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books"—how he said it!—"in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside."

Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

Elizabeth A. Drew

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.

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

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.

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