Literature Quotes - Page 96

No government is here forever. And there are other forces - the most potent force in our society, in fact, big business - doing good for the environment.

I'd rather spend my leisure time doing what some people call my work and I call my fun.

Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it's the world's largest land mass and offered the most wild species to begin with.

An engaged woman is always more agreeable than a disengaged. She is satisfied with herself. Her cares are over, and she feels that she may exert all her powers of pleasing without suspicion. All is safe with a lady engaged; no harm can be done.

It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.

If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon.

Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances.

It is curious for one who studies the action and reaction of national literature on each other, to see the humor of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be, to the English mind.

And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days.

One of the things I could never get accustomed to in my youth was the difference I found between life and literature.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

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

Life is rather above the measure of us all (save for a very few perhaps). We all need literature that is above our measure--though we may not have sufficient energy for it all the time.

Humans have a knack for choosing precisely the things that are worst for them.

His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even... knowledge, was foolproof.

Every few seconds a new book sees the light of day. Most of them will just be a part of the hum that makes us hard of hearing. Even the book is becoming an instrument of forgetting. A truly literary work comes into being as its creator's cry of protest against the forgetting that looms over him, over his predecessors and his contemporaries alike, and over his time, and the language he speaks. A literary work is something that defies death.

When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.

Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.

It is fortunate that Literature is in no ways injured by the follies of Collectors, since though they preserve the worthless, they necessarily defend the good.

Actually, the true story of a person's life can never be written. It is beyond the power of literature. The full tale of any life would be both utterly boring and utterly unbelievable.

I am forced to say that I have many fiercer critics than myself.

At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded.

I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans