Literature Quotes - Page 36

It is impossible for us to understand the Church if we regard her as subject to the limitations of human culture. For she is essentially a supernatural organism which transcends human cultures and transforms them to her own ends.

Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.

Right is its own defense.

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

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.

Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.

I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.

Each person has a literature inside them.

Nothing in fine print is ever good news.

Everybody wants to get enlightened but nobody wants to change.

It is good to follow one's own bent, so long as it leads upward.

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.

Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend.

In the lack of judgment great harm arises, but one vote cast can set right a house.

I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.

What we value about music and literature are the moments that they create in our minds when we encounter them.

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.

Literature should not be exclusive, it should be inclusive. My general view is that you can't, based on your own experience, project what a book will do for someone else. That's why I don't review books.

...life every now and then becomes literature...as if life had been made and not happened.

The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow.

A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.

Thou hast seen nothing yet.

Fair and softly goes far.

Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable - and life is more than a dream.

The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.