Literature Quotes

Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.

"Let them call me a rebel and welcome it. Fore I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils were I to make a whore of my soul"

And remember also that in fighting Man, we must not come to resemble him.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Life is short, craft long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult.

Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!

What God was, in fact, was a doctor, a famous surgeon: don't ask questions, I don't answer them, pay your fees, I'll save you if I care to be if I don't it's your own fault.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.

The whole purport of literature is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.

...for the faults of married people continually spur up each of them, hour by hour, to do better and to meet and love upon a higher ground. And ever, between the failures, there will come glimpses of kind virtues to encourage and console.

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe; we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

In comparison to parents, spouses, and children, siblings are relatively invisible in contemporary film and literature.

She'd rather be reading....

As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things.

In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You can scrape all you want, you can, if you have money, hire someone else to scrape, but the barnacles will come back or at least leave a blemish on the steel.

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.