Literature Quotes - Page 35

• They tend to be civil servants, often diplomats drawn from the Foreign Office, who may be very pleasant, intelligent people, but once they get inside the Palace they're riveted to the status quo and they lose track of public opinion in the real world.

  Anthony Holden

  Real, Intelligent, Track

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• I don't hate anyone. I dislike. But my dislike is the equivalent of anyone else's hate.

  Elsa Maxwell

  Hate, Don't Hate, Dislike

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• I moved here when I was 20 to go to college. After I moved here, I became much more aware of the importance of the culture and literature to my life. Sometimes when you're immersed in something, you just don't notice it very much. Moving away makes you appreciate your culture. Living here, I've thought more and more about India, and what being Indian-American means to me. And it's made me incorporate things from Indian literature into my own writing.

  Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  Moving, Writing, Mean

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• There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Emotion

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• This, indeed, is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature-that without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null.

  F. L. Lucas

  Passion, Null, Done

  F. L. Lucas (2012). “Style: The Art of Writing Well”, Harriman House Limited

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• Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found, to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country.

  Helen Dunmore

  Country, Delight, Golden

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• Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.

  Mark Haddon

  Children, Book, Writing

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• Unity is the most important thing on the road to stamping out terror. You need global rules of law and order, and they have to be enforced. Start with that principle.

  Chris Matthews

  Order, Law, Unity

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• Being a professor and working are not the same thing. The academic community is composed largely of nitwits. If I may generalize. People who don't know very much about what matters very much, who view life through literature rather than the other way around.

  Robert B. Parker

  What Matters, Views, People

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• Yes, the highest things are beyond words. That is probably why all art aspires to the condition of wordlessness. When literature works on you, it does so in silence, in your dreams, in your wordless moments. Good words enter you and become moods, become the quiet fabric of your being. Like music, like painting, literature too wants to transcend its primary condition and become something higher. Art wants to move into silence, into the emotional and spiritual conditions of the world. Statues become melodies, melodies become yearnings, yearnings become actions.

  Ben Okri

  Dream, Spiritual, Art

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• Each person has a literature inside them. But when people lose language, when they have to experiment with putting their thoughts together on the spot-that's what I love most. That's where character lives.

  Anna Deavere Smith

  Character, People, Decision

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• If conversation be an art, like painting, sculpture, and literature, it owes its most power charm to nature; and the least shade of formality or artifice destroys the effect of the best collection of words.

  Henry Theodore Tuckerman

  Art, Sculpture, Shade

  Henry Theodore Tuckerman (1850). “The optimist”, p.77

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• I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature.

  Kenneth Koch

  Mother, Cincinnati Ohio, Sides

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• A woman's health is her capital.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Fitness Motivational, Women's Health

  Harriet Beecher Stowe (1868). “The Chimney-corner”, p.126

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• By complex ways, by looking deep into the dark well of the human soul, full of filth, somewhere at the very bottom of it Chekhov at last found his faith. And this faith turned out to be faith in man, in the power of human progress. And man became his god.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Dark

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• The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Clever, Reason, Obstinacy

  Harriet Beecher Stowe (1866). “Little Foxes, Or, The Little Failings which Mar Domestic Happiness”, p.70

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• To do common things perfectly is far better worth our endeavor than to do uncommon things respectably.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Common, Endeavor, Uncommon

  Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe (2008). “American Woman's Home”, p.189, Applewood Books

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• The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Future, Past, Reality

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• This propaganda of dis-associating Western Negroes from Africa is not a new one. For many years white propagandists have been printing tons of literature to impress scattered Ethiopia, especially that portion within their civilization, with the idea that Africa is a despised place, inhabited by savages, and cannibals, where no civilized human being should go, especially black civilized human beings. This propaganda is promulgated for the cause that is being realized today. That cause is COLONIAL EXPANSION for the white nations of the world.

  Marcus Garvey

  Years, Civilization, Ideas

  Marcus Garvey, Amy Jacques Garvey (1923). “The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Or, Africa for the Africans”, p.54, The Majority Press

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• Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa! Let us work towards the one glorious end of a free, redeemed and mighty nation. Let Africa be a bright star among the constellation of nations.

  Marcus Garvey

  Stars, Wake Up, Ends

  Marcus Garvey (2015). “Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey”, p.8, Ravenio Books

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• A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.

  Karen Thompson Walker

  Jobs, Doe, Stories

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• My books have done extremely well, I know. But I don't honestly feel much different from when I began to write. I still think we have a long way to go. I suppose my name means more in Nigeria today than it did five years ago. But I feel the job that literature should do in our community has not even started. It's not yet part of the life of the nation. We are still at the beginning. It's a big beginning, because now we are catching the next generation in the schools. When I was their age, I had nothing to read that had any relevance to my own environment.

  Chinua Achebe

  Jobs, Book, Mean

  Chinua Achebe, Bernth Lindfors (1997). “Conversations with Chinua Achebe”, p.19, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• More than any other contemporary British playwright, Tom Stoppard populates his plays -- from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to The Invention of Love (his portrait of the poet and scholar A. E. Housman) -- with characters from life and literature. But one cannot always tell the difference between those who are real and those who are imaginary.

  Mel Gussow

  Real, Character, Play

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• There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing.

  Francine Prose

  Occasions

  Francine Prose (2009). “Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them”, p.25, Harper Collins

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• I'm a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela's famous novel 'The Underdogs,' and that says a lot about who they are and the music they make.

  Daniel Alarcon

  Names, Underdog, Band

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