Best Literature Quotes

Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

Literature is the noblest of all the arts.

Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments.

A bad review is like baking a cake with all the best ingredients and having someone sit on it.

Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

For Mythology is the handmaid of literature;

and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.

Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites...some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way.

The best of men cannot suspend their fate; The good die early, and the bad die late.

Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.

A good idea will keep you awake during the morning, but a great idea will keep you awake during the night.

I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author's own conscience.

Because the only people for me are the mad ones.

The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.

Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.

The last paragraph in which you tell what the story is about is almost always best left out.

My greatest influence has been the blues.

And that's a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have.

Revenge is barren of itself: it is the dreadful food it feeds on;

its delight is murder, and its end is despair.

The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading.

Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times.

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.

What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.

You get below the Mason-Dixon line and you have some of the best music, culture, the two races, the literature, and it's so rich.

I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate lots of meanings and translations.

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions.

'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination.

If it's a woman it's caustic, if it's a man it's authority, If it's a woman it's too pushy, if it's a man it's aggressive in the best sense of the word.

There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.

Nearly all our powerful men in this age of the world are unbelievers;

the best of them in doubt and misery; the worst in reckless defiance; the plurality, in plodding hesitation, doing, as well as they can, what practical work lies ready to their hands.

It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches.

It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. But business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment.

There's a history of English literature where the best boils to the top, and Jane Austen stands right at the top of that.

You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,' but that ain't no matter. That book was made by a Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.

Good taste cannot supply the place of genius in literature, for the best proof of taste, when there is no genius, would be, not to write at all.

We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.