Literature Quotes - Page 73

He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, and derived genuine pleasure from contemplating a painting, a statuette, a rare lace curtain - no matter what - after he had bought it and placed it among his household gods.

I don't want to be involved in endless media gossip.

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

St. Paul's arose like some huge mountain above the enormous mass of smaller buildings.

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.

I am already so popular that anyone who vilifies me becomes more popular than I am.

Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure

You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office; even were the world to come to an end, you'd have to destroy the universe first and then government offices.

Literature is ... a game, but it's a game one can put one's life into.

There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.

Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.

Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

Mere bashfulness without merit is awkwardness.

The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding.

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.

The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves.

Literature is the most beautiful of countries

One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.

Observation is an old man's memory.

What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.

Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.