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Literary Quotes

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Literary Quotes

“Short story collections are the literary equivalent of canapés, tapas and mezze in the world of gastronomy: Delightful assortments of tasty morsels to whet the reader's appetite.”

InspirationalInspirational QuotesReaderAppetiteShort StoryDelightfulLiterary FictionInspirational LivingShort StoriesReadersLiteraryShortReadershipTastyShort Story CollectionReaders And WritersLiterary QuotesTapasGastronomyAppetite For LifeAppetitesReaders And WritingShort FictionReaders And ReadingEquivalentLiterary QuoteReaders FavoriteDelightful QuoteLiterary InspirationAssortmentsAssortmentCanapésMezzeMorselsTasty Treats
Book:Impromptu Scribe
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“An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. . . . We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.”

StoriesReadingSurpriseLiteraryRereadingLewisInklingsRe ReadingUnliterary
Book:On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
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“What happened in Scotland in the 1960s and the 1970s and what laid the foundation for the enormous creative achievements of the 1980s was the liberation of the voice. The Scottish voice declared its independence. The liberation of the voice was at first the acceptance of and an assertion of the vernacular. But the real liberation of the voice came not from the assertion of the rights of the vernacular itself, but from the assertion of the right to move without boundaries between the vernacular and standard English, between the demotic and the literary.”

ScotlandLiteraryVernacular1970s1980sScottish CultureStandard EnglishDemoticScottish Voice
Book:Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and British Culture
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“Just like literature, wine takes time to learn. Before having access to the emotion of a stunning poem or to the vigor of a captivating novel, we all had to go through a long initiation. First, we need to learn the alphabet, the sound of each letter. In wine, that would be learning about the grapes and their characteristics. Then, once we master our letters, we need to learn the arrangements of letters, the pronunciation, the grammar, the structure of sentences. Now we can read. In wine, that would be the stage when we start noticing differences between two reds. You no longer drink wine: you start drinking this wine.”

WineLiteraryAnalogyWine LoversWine Guide
Author:Olivier Magny
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“Then, in an unusual moment, she grew emotional, which left little doubt about the level of profound respect and admiration Merkel had for her American colleague: ‘So eight years are coming to a close.  This is the last visit of (President) Barack Obama to our country…I am very glad that he chose Germany as one of the stopovers on this trip…Thank you for the reliable friendship and partnership you demonstrated in very difficult hours of our relationship. So let me again pay tribute to what we’ve been able to achieve, to what we discussed, to what we were able to bring about in difficult hours.”

RelationshipsMarriageHistoryGoalsLiteraryEuropean HistorySpeechesWomen In PoliticsCalculationPersonal Goals
Book:Dear Barack: The Extraordinary Partnership of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel
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“In her usual manner, Merkel spoke in German. It is worth pointing out, however, that before the translator had an opportunity to convert her statements to English, Obama gave the chancellor and the press a big smile, saying, ‘I think what she said was good. I’m teasing.’ The laughter in the room drowned out the sounds of the cameras clicking and flashing, with Merkel’s giggle and smile among the loudest.”

PoliticsRelationshipsHistoryInternationalAmerican HistoryDiplomacyLiteraryEuropean HistorySpeechesWomen In Politics
Book:Dear Barack: The Extraordinary Partnership of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel
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“Could a literary life be referred to with the iambic pentameter of, say, harnessing wind power, transplanting hearts or saving the whales. Or did it necessitate the sombre and monotonous dirge of software, priority banking or turbine building.”

WritingSignificanceLiteraryMonotonyProfessions
Book:Goodnight and God Bless: On Life, Literature, and a Few Other Things, with Footnotes, Quotes, and Other Such Literary Diversions
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“From under her relentless hatred of you, which is sincere and absolute, shines love at every moment and... madness... the most sincere and boundless love, and - madness! Conversely, from under the love she feels for me, also sincerely, there shines hatred at every moment - the greatest hatred! Until now I could never have imagined all these "metamorphoses".”

RelationshipsEmotionalMadnessPsychologicalComplexityParadoxIntrospectionDualityLove And HateLiterary
Book:Demons
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“Anatomy of Typos (Sonnet) It took me a 100 books to realize this, typos are not a stain upon literature, typos are ornament of literature, sweet reminders of human endeavor. It's great to have literature without typos, like it's great to have a life without regrets. But in actuality, only the dead have no regrets, only the uncreative make no typographical mistakes. There are typos that are grievous, hence, need correcting, but most typos are harmless. Repulsed by typos means repulsed by literature, repulsed by regrets means repulsed by existence. Typos are the ornament of literature, regrets are the ornament of life. To make peace with regrets is the beginning of life, to make peace with typos is to empower literary light.”

WritingLiteratureRegretsLiteraryTypographyPublishing IndustryBibliophileTyposProofreadingTypo
Book:The God Sonnets: Naskar Art of Theology
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“Stepping forward, Girl stares out the doorway, into the sun. “I used to tread the world freely in Mira,” she smiles gently. “My feet would feel the bare earth sifting its way between my toes. I’d push a cart full of wares, hearing it roll along the bumpy terrain, catching stones and flicking them up into the air.”

MemoriesMysteryLiteraryNature ConnectionSeeking RefugeDesire For FreedomSilk Merchant
Book:Adira and the Dark Horse
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“In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.”

RealitySecretMysteryReaderUncertaintyLiteraryUncannyEffectDeviceAutomatonUnheimlich
Book:Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen
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“Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called "Rushdie," and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd.”

WarReligionHistoryTerrorismMemoirFree SpeechSecularismLiteraryAristotleFatwaAverroësIbn Rushd
Book:Joseph Anton: A Memoir
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“Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised. When we talked, our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths, staggered like drunken men. Because we were not using our languages we said things we did not mean; what we really wanted to say remained folded inside. trapped. In America we did not always have the words. It was only when were were by ourselves that we spoke in our real voices. When we were alone we summoned the horses of our languages and mounted their backs and galloped past skyscrapers. Always, we were reluctant to come back.”

LiteraryZimbabweAfrican AuthorsAfrican Literature
Book:We Need New Names
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“Now when the men talk, their voices burn in the air, making smoke all over the place. We hear about change, about new country, about democracy, about elections and what-what. They talk and talk, the men, lick their lips and look at the dead watches on their wrists and shake their hands and slap each other and laugh like they have swallowed thunder.”

Literary FictionLiteraryZimbabweAfrican AuthorsAfrican Literature
Book:We Need New Names
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“Pressing my nails firmly into the bark of the tree, I watch as a silhouette reveals itself in the moonlight. Tall and built, the human frame enters the clearing that I stand in. My eyes are immediately drawn to the breathtaking sight of his face. I am familiar with those deep brown eyes, which draw me gently towards him. I let him pull me into his warm embrace. “Kirano!” I breathe, pressing my head against his regal blue jacket. I can hear his heart beating rapidly with excitement. “Aisha,” Kirano’s voice is as soothing as I remember. Looking up, I see his warm, adoring smile. “I see that you tied your favourite silk scarf to the tree.”

RomanceNightMysteryAttractionForestLiteraryEpistolaryJournal EntryRomantic Rendezvous
Book:Adira and the Dark Horse
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“James's critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. [...] In England, ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the public, the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought. [...] James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation." (Little Review, 1918)”

WritingIdeasLiteraryHenry James
Author:T.S. Eliot
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“What did I think? Right then I was thinking about my father, specifically his habit of treating everyone with courtesy and consideration, of how he used to stop on lower Division Street and converse genially with old black men from the Hill whom he knew from his early days as a route man. His kindness and interest weren't feigned, nor did they derive, I'm convinced, from any perceived send of duty. His behavior was merely an extension of who he was. But here's the thing about my father that I've come to understand only reluctantly and very recently. If he wasn't the cause of what ailed his fellow man, neither was he the solution. He believed in "Do unto Others." It was a good, indeed golden, rule to by and it never occurred to him that perhaps it wasn't enough. "You ain't gotta love people," I remember him proclaiming to the Elite Coffee Club guys at Ikey's back in the early days. Confused by mean-spirited behavior, he was forever explaining how little it cost to be polite, to be nice to people. Make them feel good then they're down because maybe tomorrow you'll be down. Such a small thing. Love, he seemed to understand, was a very big thing indeed, its cost enormous and maybe more than you could afford if you were spendthrift. Nobody expects that of you, asny more than they expected you to hand out hundred-dollar bills on the street corner. And I remember my mother's response when he repeated over dinner what he'd told the men at the store. "Really, Lou? Isn't that exactly what we're supposed to do? Love people? Isn't that what the Bible says?”

Coming Of AgeArtistsLiterarySmall Town America
Book:Bridge of Sighs
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“The Special Operations Network was instigated to handle policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force. There were thirty departments in all, starting at the more mundane Neighborly Disputes (SO-30) and going onto Literary Detectives (SO-27) and Art Crime (SO-24). Anything below SO-20 was restricted information, although it was common knowledge that the ChronoGuard was SO-12 and Antiterrorism SO-9. It is rumored that SO-1 was the department that polices the SpecOps themselves. Quite what the others do is anyone's guess. What is known is that the individual operatives themselves are mostly ex-military or ex-police and slightly unbalanced. 'If you want to be a SpecOp,' the saying goes, 'act kinda weird...”

ArtMilitaryCrimePoliceUnusualTime TravelWeirdDetectivesLiteraryRestrictedAntiterrorismSpecialized
Book:The Eyre Affair
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“First they told me: “build a following and the industry will follow.” So I spent my entire 20s building a following on zero budget, getting by on donations. Then they told me: “You need a literary agent. But a literary agent wants to see you have a following and something big going on.” So I started my own small press and self published 5 books and spent day and night connecting with my people until I’d sold over 35,000 copies in 35 different countries and now they tell me: “no agent wants to work with a self published author.” Sometimes I feel like I was doomed from the very start, the very day I sat my food on that plane to London 12 years ago. Like the whole world keeps saying “you can fight all you want but we won’t let you in.” But I do have freedom and I do have my following and I have vulnerable souls writing to me on Friday nights, about loss and hope and how my books or music or words played a small part in something they went through and sometimes I think I would throw all that away just to have a literary agent and a management and the contracts and headlines… because I’m tired.. of always fighting uphill.. but then I get that message, on a Monday night, and I take my computer to a bar close to where I live in Berlin, high above the city, and I write like never before because I have my people and vulnerable souls to find and I have so many books in me and time is not endless, time is crucial, and lately I’ve felt it running out, some nights, so I’m writing another book that won’t be noticed by the agents but I have my people and that’s all I will care about from now on. My people and my freedom, with time running out. That’s what I will focus on.”

EntrepreneurshipWriting ProcessWriting LifeLiteraryIndie AuthorAuthors On WritingSelf PublishingBook PublishingLiterary Agent
Author:Charlotte Eriksson
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“I had long ago determined that I would devote my life to literary scholarship. Not, let me emphasise, the dry-as-dust scholarship of academe, the crushing orthodoxy to be found in universities, but rather the recondite scholarship that is a journey into the unknown. I refer, chiefly, to those dead authors whose works savour of the uncanny and the marvellous, authors whose unique perspectives are beyond the self-stultifying purview of the modern critical mania for so-called realism. For my part I chose the mysteries, and the hierophant of mystery was an obscure author called Arthur Machen.”

MysteryLiteraryScholar QuotesMachen
Book:The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales
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“One night, we workers formed a circle around the tallow candle as it burned, allowing each other to bond by holding hands. It felt strange to connect with fellow people from Mira again. We have all become estranged from each other as we slave away for the woman leader. In our circle, we closed our eyes and prayed. I pictured the streets of Mira, adorned with the rugged rawness of our original footprints. We once stepped together or passed each other by, busy but comfortable with our work in various trades. Now we are anonymous, our identities stripped away from us.”

PrayerMysteryLiteraryEstrangementDesire For FreedomForced Labour
Book:Adira and the Dark Horse
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