Literature Quotes - Page 102

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.

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

Scientists - the crowd that for dash and style make the general public look like the Bloomsbury set.

Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.

If you are truly serious abut preparing your child for the future, don't teach him to subtract teach him to deduct.

Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.

We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity.

Sexual relations, of course, have existed, exist, and will exist. However, this is in no way connected with the indispensability of the existence of the family.

One of the unsung freedoms that go with a free press is the freedom not to read it.

Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.

Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.

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

Slight not what's near through aiming at what's far.

Some wisdom you must learn from one who's wise

Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.

Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.

I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.

I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair.