Literature Quotes - Page 27

• Humanity is made up of an infinity of different individuals. Each of us travels for motives exclusively his own.

  Ella Maillart

  Humanity, Different, Infinity

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• I wanted to learn a few foreign languages, and therefore I had to go abroad.

  Ella Maillart

  Travel, Language, Wanted

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• One travels so as to learn once more how to marvel at life in the way a child does. And blessed be the poet, the artist who knows how to keep alive his sense of wonder.

  Ella Maillart

  Children, Blessed, Artist

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• Only when one is able to grasp wideness can one possess it.

  Ella Maillart

  Able

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• When I look at something, it is certain that for an instant I am one with what I see.

  Ella Maillart

  Looks, Certain, Instant

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• That idea of escapism... these words could sum up my life.

  Ella Maillart

  Ideas, Escapism

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• The state of minds vary according to the angle under which one examines them.

  Ella Maillart

  Mind, States, Angle

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• When the heart speaks, its language is the same under all latitudes.

  Ella Maillart

  Heart, Language, Speak

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• I wish that the adults who are 'in power' cared more about what their children read. Books are incredibly powerful when we are young - the books I read as a child have stayed with me my entire life - and yet, the people who write about books, for the most part, completely ignore children's literature.

  Gabrielle Zevin

  Children, Powerful, Book

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• Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.

  Northrop Frye

  Mythology, Humans, Human Society

  Northrop Frye (2014). “The Northrop Frye Quote Book”, p.229, Dundurn

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• The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy - rather like a long-term marriage.

  Will Self

  Art, Long, Curious

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• As its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we cant predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe. Poised between intransigent scepticism and uncritical credulity, it is par excellence the literature of the open mind.

  John Brunner

  Mind, Excellence, Different

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• Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Carpentry

  "Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69". Interview with Peter H. Stone, www.theparisreview.org. 1981.

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• I never really separated painting and literature.

  Cy Twombly

  Painting

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• Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.

  Abraham Verghese

  Beautiful, Imagination, Alive

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• Literature is the daughter of heaven, who descended upon earth to soften and charm all human ills.

  Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

  Daughter, Heaven, Earth

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• The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behooves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c'est l homme, what is likely to happen if l homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?

  Ethel Smyth

  Clouds, Indulge In, Personality

  Ethel Smyth (1922). “Streaks of life”

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• Abdur Rab offers a comprehensive vision of Islam using the Quran as his sole religious textual source. He intentionally avoids the hadith literature, which he believes, and argues, has done much damage to the message of the Quran. His work provides many thought-provoking insights and should be a significant contribution to the 'Quran only' movement in modern Islam.

  Jeffrey Lang

  Religious, Believe, Thought Provoking

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• The Astonishment Tapes will now take its place within the growing field of international research about postwar American poetry's important contribution to world literature. Miriam Nichols has once again done exceptional scholarship.

  Peter Gizzi

  Important, Astonishment, Fields

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• Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Art, Jobs, Book

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• Smell is a word, perfume is literature.

  Jean-Claude Ellena

  Smell, Perfume

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• Inevitably, people tell me that poor folks are lazy or unintelligent, that they are somehow deserving of their poverty. However, if you begin to look at the sociological literature on poverty, a more complex picture emerges. Poverty and unemployment are part and parcel of our economic order. Without them, capitalism would cease to function effectively, and in order to continue to function, the system itself must produce poverty and an army of underemployed or unemployed people.

  Bob Torres

  Army, Order, People

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• Russian literature saved my soul.  When I was a young girl in school and I asked what is good and what is evil, no one in that corrupt system could show me.

  Irina Ratushinskaya

  Girl, School, Evil

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• The hard-drinking newspaperman is, or used to be, a stock character of fiction. Now he is being phased out of literature just as he is being phased out of life.

  Waverley Root

  Drinking, Character, Fiction

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• People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater.

  Minnie Maddern Fiske

  Art, People, Understanding

  Minnie Maddern Fiske, Alexander Woollcott (1917). “Mrs. Fiske: Her Views on Actors, Acting, and the Problems of Production”

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