Literature Quotes - Page 15

• Self-reform is the only kind that works.

  Mason Cooley

  Self, Reform, Kind

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• Some loves are like a vice that has ceased to give pleasure.

  Mason Cooley

  Giving, Vices, Pleasure

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• The only peace is being out of earshot.

  Mason Cooley

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• While there's life, there's fear.

  Mason Cooley

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• Sloth, not ill-will, makes me unjust.

  Mason Cooley

  Ill Will, Sloth, Unjust

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• Know what to do if you feel faint or dizzy, especially if you might fall and hit your head.

  Marilyn vos Savant

  Fall, Might, Dizzy

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• One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour.

  Joseph Campbell

  News, Today, Spirit

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.1, Anchor

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• Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Grows, Has Beens

  Evelyn Waugh (1983). “The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh”, Methuen

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• You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.

  Ray Bradbury

  Book, Writing, Library

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• Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.

  Karl Kraus

  Marriage, Society, Unions

  Thomas Stephen Szasz, Karl Kraus (1990). “Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry”, p.152, Syracuse University Press

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• Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.

  Karl Kraus

  People, Solitude, Would Be

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• Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.

  Iris Murdoch

  Christ

  Iris Murdoch (1984). “The Sacred and Profane Love Machine”, p.88, Penguin

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• I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.

  Anne Stevenson

  Loyal, Austen, Schubert

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• The Bible is a sanctum; the world, sputum.

  Franz Kafka

  World

  Franz Kafka (1991). “The Blue Octavo Notebooks”

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• The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.

  Franz Kafka

  Men, Evil, Mediation

  Franz Kafka (1954). “Wedding preparations in the country: and other posthumous prose writings. With notes by Max Brod”

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• We seem to live a culture that doesn't want blemishes. The vision of most beautiful models... airbrushed in order to be seen as perfect, infects our notion of how literature should be written.

  Alberto Manguel

  Beautiful, Order, Perfect

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• People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I'm desperately trying to do is to get students to talk to themselves as though they are indeed themselves, and not someone else.

  Harold Bloom

  Reading, Writing, People

  "Falstaff for our times". www.theguardian.com. March 5, 1999.

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• My family pleaded with me to forget literature and do something sensible, such as find some sort of useful work.

  Lloyd Alexander

  Writing, Forget, My Family

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• Nothing dates like hate and in literature a little of it goes a very long way.

  Cyril Connolly

  Hate, Long, Littles

  Cyril Connolly (1975). “The evening colonnade”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• Much melancholy has devolved upon mankind, and it is detestable to me that might will triumph in the end...

  Karel Capek

  Triumph, Might, Melancholy

  "Karel Čapek: Life and Work". Book by Ivan Klima, 2002.

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• One never knows whether people have principles on principle or whether for their own personal satisfaction.

  Karel Capek

  People, Principles, Satisfaction

  "Letters from England". Book by Karel Capek, 1925.

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• The paranoiac is the exact image of the ruler. The only difference is their position in the world. One might even think the paranoiac the more impressive of the two because he is sufficient unto himself and cannot be shaken by failure.

  Elias Canetti

  Thinking, Two, Differences

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• One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

  Gustave Flaubert

  Blood, Style, Tire

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• One man finds in religion his literature and his science, another finds in it his joy and his duty.

  Joseph Joubert

  Men, Joy, Religion

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• I'm not rational enough to be a good journalist.

  Jim Harrison

  Enough, Rational, Journalist

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, themorningnews.org. June 7, 2004.

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