Literature Quotes - Page 64

The wavering mind is but a base possession.

The best of seers is he who guesses well.

But learn that to die is a debt we must all pay.

To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.

It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire.

Literature is an inquiry into the deepest yearnings of the human spirit.

Sometimes I can't figure designers out. It's as if they flunked human anatomy.

A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.

Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.

Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

Feminism is a good venue for getting yourself across as much as for getting your point across.

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

Justice requires that everyone should have enough to eat. But it also requires that everyone should contribute to the production of food.

If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble.

The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind.

The Ten Commandments have never been replaced as the moral basis upon which society rests.

To him who knows to prosper and does it not, to him it is sin.

Believing in evolution is believing in the unproved, while believing in Christ is believing in the proven.

So much of our lives is given over to the consideration of our imperfections that there is no time to improve our imaginary virtues. The truth is we only perfect our vices, and man is a worse creature when he dies than he was when he was born.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.