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#literature

Read through the most famous quotes by topic #literature




We have no time to waste on insignificant books, hollow books, books that are there to please... We want books that cost their authors a great deal, books where you can feel the years of work, the backache, the writer's block, the author's panic at the thought that he might be lost: his discouragement, his courage, his anguish, his stubbornness, the risk of failure that he has taken. ↗


— Laurence Cossé


#literature #courage

Gormenghast. Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet beats away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs... And darkness winds between the characters. - Gormenghast ↗


— Mervyn Peake


#classic #gormenghast #gothic #literature #art

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify--capriciously--their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships--and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes--husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer... ↗


— Tom Stoppard


#history #literature #art

Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score. ↗


— Kurt Vonnegut


#art

Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. ↗


— Henry Miller


#develop #forget #interest #interesting #interesting people

Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language. ↗


— Henry James


#english #literature #summer #beauty

Amor, ch'al cor gentile ratto s'apprende prese costui de la bella persona che mi fu tolta; e 'l modo ancor m'offende. Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona, Mi prese del costui piacer sì forte, Che, come vedi, ancor non m'abbandona..." "Love, which quickly arrests the gentle heart, Seized him with my beautiful form That was taken from me, in a manner which still grieves me. Love, which pardons no beloved from loving, took me so strongly with delight in him That, as you see, it still abandons me not... ↗


— Dante Alighieri


#italy #love #medieval-literature #poetry #beauty

White as ash, her face, but ashes hold the phantoms of fires. ↗


— Esther M. Friesner


#beauty

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. ↗


— Barbara Tuchman


#carriers #civilization #crippled #dumb #history






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