149 Thought-Provoking Literature Quotes

In the vast landscape of literature, certain quotes stand out not just for their eloquence but for their profound ability to stir our minds and challenge our perceptions. These thought-provoking gems encapsulate universal truths, timeless wisdom, and complex emotions, all within a few memorable lines. As readers journey through stories crafted by the greatest minds, they often encounter phrases that linger long after the page is turned, inviting reflection and introspection. In this curated collection of the top 149 thought-provoking literature quotes, we celebrate the words that have sparked intellectual curiosity and inspired countless readers to view the world through a different lens. Whether you're seeking insight, inspiration, or a deeper understanding of the human experience, these quotes are sure to leave an indelible impact on your literary journey.

1. “Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.” - G.K. Chesterton

2. “Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious,skirmishes against the authorraging along the borders of every pagein tiny black script.If I could just get my hands on you,Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,they seem to say,I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -that kind of thing.I remember once looking up from my reading,my thumb as a bookmark,trying to imagine what the person must look likewho wrote "Don't be a ninny"alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.Students are more modestneeding to leave only their splayed footprintsalong the shore of the page.One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.Another notes the presence of "Irony"fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,Hands cupped around their mouths.Absolutely," they shoutto Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation pointsrain down along the sidelines.And if you have managed to graduate from collegewithout ever having written "Man vs. Nature"in a margin, perhaps nowis the time to take one step forward.We have all seized the white perimeter as our ownand reached for a pen if only to showwe did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;we pressed a thought into the wayside,planted an impression along the verge.Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoriajotted along the borders of the Gospelsbrief asides about the pains of copying,a bird singing near their window,or the sunlight that illuminated their page-anonymous men catching a ride into the futureon a vessel more lasting than themselves.And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,they say, until you have read himenwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.Yet the one I think of most often,the one that dangles from me like a locket,was written in the copy of Catcher in the RyeI borrowed from the local libraryone slow, hot summer.I was just beginning high school then,reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,and I cannot tell youhow vastly my loneliness was deepened,how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,when I found on one pageA few greasy looking smearsand next to them, written in soft pencil-by a beautiful girl, I could tell,whom I would never meet-Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.” - Billy Collins

3. “Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.” - Charles Caleb Colton

4. “We now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships, since these are very neatly described by the quantum theory worked out between 1900 and 1930. What's more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical universe, as discovered between 1920 and 1930....The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern 'knowledge' is that it is wrong...My answer to him was, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that 'right' and 'wrong' are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts, and I will devote this essay to an explanation of why I think so.When my friend the English literature expert tells me that in every century scientists think they have worked out the universe and are always wrong, what I want to know is how wrong are they? Are they always wrong to the same degree?” - Isaac Asimov

5. “Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.” - Virginia Woolf

6. “I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived. ” - Margaret Mitchell

7. “The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.” - Gustave Flaubert

8. “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.[Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Nov. 1980), pp. 16-32]” - Barbara Tuchman

9. “Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.” - John Ruskin

10. “[...] as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out [...] the literary novel has become extraordinarily privatistic of late. It's as if the big issues (Does God exist? from whence springs decency? what sort of species is Homo Sapiens?) were either settled or not worth discusssing, and serious writers should therefore confine themselves to their various ethnic heritages and interpersonal relationships.” - James Morrow

11. “There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” - George Washington

12. “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.” - Henry David Thoreau

13. “Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.--speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962” - John Steinbeck

14. “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!” - J.R.R. Tolkien

15. “Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.” - Christopher Hitchens

16. “Eles não podem agir de outra maneira, os senhores da criação. O privilégio da criação lhes é irrenunciável. Nós, mulheres, temos que ser criaturas, sim, e criaturas perfeitas. Sejamos agradecidas aos cavaleiros suecos, principalmente ao fatídico Axel, por terem desequilibrado tão artisticamente as faculdades da menina Agnes. As mulheres levemente desequilibradas se qualificam como musas excelentes.” - Günter Grass

17. “Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.” - Aristotle

18. “Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.” - Jane Austen

19. “In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.” - Dan Simmons

20. “We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.” - Anne Frank

21. “She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.” - Annie Dillard

22. “I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.” - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

23. “There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?” - Marina Tsvetaeva

24. “Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.” - William Butler Yeats

25. “Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.” - James Wood

26. “أسمع من المحيط إلى الخليج أن من لا يقدر على إفهامنا لم تحل معادلات الدرجة الثانية بالطريقة التي تحل بها يخرف حول ابستمولوجية السقوط الحر ونسبية اينشتاين خلطا بين التعليقات الإيديولوجية والنفسية على مايزعم جاريا في وعي العلماء وتصوراتهم وبين فهم آليات الإبداع العلمي وقوانينه” - أبو يعرب المرزوقي

27. “People don't expect too much from literature. They just want to know they're not alone with being confused.” - Jonathan Ames

28. “Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.” - Anthony Burgess

29. “Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.” - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

30. “What a tribute this is to art; what a misfortune this is for history. (In reference to Shakespeare's 'Richard III')” - Paul Murray Kendall

31. “The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.” - Charles Dickens

32. “Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?” - Italo Calvino

33. “The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.” - Marguerite Yourcenar

34. “There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries” - Italo Calvino

35. “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other” - Anton Chekhov

36. “Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.” - Julian Barnes

37. “In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder, when the healing grace of authentic spirituality is usurped by the divisive politics of religious organizations, and when broken hearts bleed pain in darkness without the relief of compassion, the voice of an exceptional poet producing exceptional work is not something the world can afford to dismiss.” - Aberjhani

38. “Un bon croquis vaut mieux qu'un long discours (A good sketch is better than a long speech)” - Napoleon Bonaparte

39. “So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.” - Roald Dahl

40. “I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland” - Arthur Conan Doyle

41. “The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.” - James Goldsmith

42. “Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” - Oscar Wilde

43. “Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.” - Orhan Pamuk

44. “There are books, that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always keeps at hand, that one takes along from city to city, from country to country, carefully packed, even when there is very little room, and perhaps one leafs through them while removing them from a trunk; yet one carefully refrains from reading even a complete sentence. Then after twenty years, there comes a moment when suddenly, as though under a high compulsion, one cannot help taking in such a book from beginning to end, at one sitting: it is like a revelation. Now one knows why one made such a fuss about it. It had to be with one for a long time; it had to travel; it had to occupy space; it had to be a burden; and now it has reached the goal of its voyage, now it reveals itself, now it illuminates the twenty bygone years it mutely lived with one. It could not say so much if it had not been there mutely the whole time, and what idiot would dare to assert that the same things had always been in it.” - Elias Canetti

45. “Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.” - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

46. “Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.” - Susan Sontag

47. “Puns are the highest form of literature.” - Alfred Hitchcock

48. “Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.” - Cyril Connolly

49. “He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.” - Roberto Bolaño

50. “It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again.This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpiece Watership Down is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since The Wind in the Willows, but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.” - Christopher Hitchens

51. “The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excuse the use of that second word, because I realize it's presumptuous. Also, excuse the first word, and the term in general.” - Dave Eggers

52. “So much of life is invisible, inscrutable: layers of thoughts, feelings, outward events entwined with secrecies, ambiguities, ambivalences, obscurities, darknesses strongly present even to the one who's lived it- maybe especially to the one who's lived it. I didn't seek to find her, wandered instead within and among her fragments of language-notebooks, drafts, journals, fictions, letters, essays, and found there whole worlds like spinning planets, lived in their cold light and burning light, wondering where I was, where they might take me. Curious, I heard a monster's voice and followed-” - Laurie Sheck

53. “I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, it’s because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death. Searching for the word in darkness. Any little success invades me and puts me in full view of everyone. I long to wallow in the mud. I can scarcely control my need for self-abasement, my craving for licentiousness and debauchery. Sin tempts me, forbidden pleasures lure me. I want to be both pig and hen, then kill them and drink their blood.” - Clarice Lispector

54. “O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!My tables, — meet it is I set it down,   115That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark:  [Writing.So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word;” - Shakespeare

55. “There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

56. “I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature.” - Nick Hornby

57. “The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life.” - Bruno Bettelheim

58. “تعرفين أني قد غششتك ... أني قد سرقتك ونهبت مالك فلماذا شكرتني- في أماكن أخرى لم يكونوا ليدفعوا لي شيئا البتة” - أنطوان تشيخوف

59. “Without literature, life is hell.” - Charles Bukowski

60. “Fantastic literature has been especially prominent in times of unrest, when the older values have been overthrown to make way for the new; it has often accompanied or predicted change, and served to shake up rational Complacency, challenging reason and reminding man of his darker nature. Its popularity has had its ups and downs, and it has always been the preserve of a small literary minority. As a natural challenger of classical values, it is rarely part of a culture's literary mainstream, expressing the spirit of the age; but it is an important dissenting voice, a reminder of the vast mysteries of existence, sometimes truly metaphysical in scope, but more often merely riddling.” - Franz Rottensteiner

61. “For thy sweet love remembr'd such wealth bringsThat then, I scorn to change my state with kings.” - William Shakespeare

62. “نجد أن الفن الحداثي يزداد ابهاما وتعقيدا حتى اصبح فنا نخبويا رغم ثورته على البرجوازية” - عبد الوهاب المسيري

63. “As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again.” - Margret Mitchell

64. “Time is a river...and books are boats. Many volumes start down that stream, only to be wrecked and lost beyond recall in its sands. Only a few, a very few, endure the testings of time and live to bless the ages following.” - R.W. and Rev. Joseph Fort Newton

65. “To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself. This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.” - Fernando Pessoa

66. “I don't believe in ONE holy book. I believe all books are holy. Of course, some books are holy shit.” - John R Lindensmith

67. “I just can't get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they want is a fairy tale.” - China Miéville

68. “He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design.""You say this as if you envied him.""There are worse prisons than words.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

69. “We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This refusal, indeed, is literature's most moral act. At a time when meanings are manifold, disparate, and always changing, the rich possibility of interpretation--the happy resistance of the text to ever be fully known and mastered--is one of the most exhilarating products of human culture.” - Marjorie Garber

70. “I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I learn less and less from them that helps me to ponder my life. In time, I found myself agreeing with the course evaluations written by my testier freshman students:'All the literature we read this term was depressing.' How naive. How sane.” - Mary Rose O'Reilley

71. “I'm not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus... Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one.” - Roman Payne

72. “Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor! Oh! worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment.” - Jane Austen

73. “Trying to live up to yourself is the most trying thing.” - Ren Garcia

74. “Praise be to God, Who has so disposed matters that pleasant literary anecdotes may serve as an instrument for the polishing of wits and the cleansing of rust from our hearts.” - Ahmad Al-Tifashi

75. “Jonah-John-if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still-not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places, at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there.” - Kurt Vonnegut

76. “Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world.” - Nadeem Aslam

77. “Pienso que en la vida de cada uno de nosotros existe un libro similar, que de pequeños no nos limitamos simplemente a leer, sino que inspeccionamos y rebuscamos en cada uno de sus rincones como si de una habitación se tratara. Un libro así, rebuscado como una habitación, escrutado o interrogado como una cara en cada rasgo y arruga, nunca podremos juzgarlo como se juzga un libro, porque para nosotros ha abandonado la zona de los libros y ha pasado a vivir a la zona de la memoria y de los afectos.” - Natalia Ginzburg

78. “something genuine like a mark in a toilet, graced with guts and gutted with grace” - E.E. Cummings

79. “Autora de los libros:Esmeralda Perdida/ Carta Pintada en la Noche/ Cuentos y Poesías para Niños: Amo a mis Animales/ Novela actual: 30 Años de Silencio” - Idelys Izquierdo Laboy

80. “I shall tell you what I believe. I believe God is a librarian. I believe that literature is holy...it is that best part of our souls that we break off and give each other, and God has a special dispensation for it, angels to guard its making and its preservation.” - Sarah Smith

81. “Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.” - David Quammen

82. “If you read Rite of Passage and enjoy yourself, I couldn't be more pleased. I hope it gets you of.On the other hand, if you should be assigned Rite of Passage, and you start to read it and it doesn't work for you, just put it aside and forget the whole thing. Tell the teacher I said it was okay. Okay?” - Alexei Panshin

83. “Current "literature" [is] well-written books in which disgusting people do disgusting things to other disgusting people for no apparent reason and with no apparent resolution.” - Roberta Gellis

84. “Books are a finer world within the world. (1863)” - Alexander Smith

85. “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

86. “The sign of a good novel is what it can cause its reader to see, even if this lies beyond the author's own vision.” - John Gaddis

87. “‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.” - Mario Vargas Llosa

88. “The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture—exploit the new thing then move on.There’s a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations.Reading is where the wild things are.” - Jeanette Winterson

89. “History gives us the facts, sort of, but from literary works we can learn what the past smelled like, sounded like, and felt like, the forgotten gritty details of a lost era. Literature brings us as close as we can come to reinhabiting the past. By reclaiming this use of literature in the classroom, perhaps we can move away from the political agitation that has been our bread and butter—or porridge and hardtack—for the last 30 years.” - Scott Herring

90. “your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before you, I replied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm you play upon me, drumming me taught.” - Jeanette Winterson

91. “I was hungry when I left Pyongyang. I wasn't hungry just for a bookshop that sold books that weren't about Fat Man and Little Boy. I wasn't ravenous just for a newspaper that had no pictures of F.M. and L.B. I wasn't starving just for a TV program or a piece of music or theater or cinema that wasn't cultist and hero-worshiping. I was hungry. I got off the North Korean plane in Shenyang, one of the provincial capitals of Manchuria, and the airport buffet looked like a cornucopia. I fell on the food, only to find that I couldn't do it justice, because my stomach had shrunk. And as a foreign tourist in North Korea, under the care of vigilant minders who wanted me to see only the best, I had enjoyed the finest fare available.” - Christopher Hitchens

92. “Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. Reckless O soul, exploring. I with thee and thou with me. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared go. And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all.” - Walt Whitman

93. “Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.” - Glen Duncan

94. “Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion’s den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them and that’s what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I’ve been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there’s a story. And that’s what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I’m in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did.” - Ray Bradbury

95. “I've always felt that the performance of a raag resembles a novel - or at least the kind of novel I'm attempting to write. You know,' he continued, extemporizing as he went along, 'first you take one note and explore it for a while, then another to discover its possibilities, then perhaps you get to the dominant, and pause for a bit, and it's only gradually that the phrases begin to form and the tabla joins in with the beat...and then the more brilliant improvisations and diversions begin, with the main theme returning from time to time, and finally it all speeds up, and the excitement increases to a climax.” - Vikram Seth

96. “She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose.” - Virginia Woolf

97. “People won't see Imagination in something that doesn't relate to their experience because of their own mental limitations. I want people to escape the expected and ordinary, to escape the regular expectations of a story, and truly step into a different world of literature.” - Lionel Suggs

98. “People who want to change everything in the world but never think of changing themselves are clapping with one palm.” - Subhan Zein

99. “In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment. Whether you write well or ill, be assured that you will not escape from blame...” - Matthew Gregory Lewis

100. “Many people don’t realize the connection between music and literature and I’m here to tell them that it does exist!” - Veronika Carnaby

101. “What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: Nothing. And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get my understanding from another source, I simply miss my life. Shall we tell our children that one thing is as good as another-- here a bit of knowledge of physics, and there a bit of knowledge of literature? If we do so, the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, because that normally is the time it takes from the birth of an idea to its full maturity when it fills the minds of a new generation and makes them think by it.Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live.” - E.F. Schumacher

102. “That cloak of love you were wearing—he’s torn it to shreds, undoing the seams of trust that held it together. How can you ever wear those shreds?” - Antonia Michaelis

103. “With the windows in his top of the range Audi firmly in place we slowly baked ourselves and chatted over why my hatred of golf was wrong, what made a good antihero and why Paul McCartney should just fuck off.” - David Louden

104. “I loved her; I didn’t know how to say it without breaking down the autobot façade she saw before her and revealing the ugly and scarred wreck that lived within my skin. So I played with the radio instead.” - David Louden

105. “literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

106. “the glory of the protagonist is always paid for by a lot of secondary characters” - Tony Hoagland

107. “When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature” - TODOROV TZVETAN

108. “The rich don't have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy.” - Lous-Ferdinand Céline

109. “The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?” - James Salter

110. “There’s a different flavor to children’s literature you read after you grow up than there was reading it as a child. Things that were sweet as a child become bitter once you grow up.” - Mizuki Nomura

111. “God is a cloud from which rain fell.” - Dejan Stojanovic

112. “Sunbathe from within.” - Dejan Stojanovic

113. “Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words.” - Dejan Stojanovic

114. “We hear only our own voices, still echoes returning to our emptiness.” - Dejan Stojanovic

115. “When the long bygone Lee Po wanted to say something, he could do it with only a few words.” - Dejan Stojanovic

116. “A smiling lie is a whirlwind, easy to enter, but hard to escape.” - Dejan Stojanovic

117. “Say No! Accept the burdens of revenge.” - Dejan Stojanovic

118. “A breeze, a forgotten summer, a smile, all can fit into a storefront window.” - Dejan Stojanovic

119. “Creators of history always play with our impotence and our ignorance.” - Dejan Stojanovic

120. “Strangers are endearing because you don’t know them yet.” - Dejan Stojanovic

121. “You don’t know anything, but I know even less.” - Dejan Stojanovic

122. “Hope without love is hopeless.” - Dejan Stojanovic

123. “Love is almost never simple.” - Dejan Stojanovic

124. “Although all days are equally long regardless of the season, some days are long not only seasonally but by rewards they offer.” - Dejan Stojanovic

125. “They will smile, as they always do when they plan a major attack late in the night.” - Dejan Stojanovic

126. “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Is that all?” - Dejan Stojanovic

127. “There is only as much space, only as much time, Only as much desire, only as many words, Only as many pages, only as much ink To accept all of us at light-speed Hurrying into the Promised Land Of oblivion that is waiting for us sooner or later.” - Dejan Stojanovic

128. “A star needs a star.” - Dejan Stojanovic

129. “Devil and God – two sides of the same face.” - Dejan Stojanovic

130. “The eyesight for an eagle is what thought is to a man.” - Dejan Stojanovic

131. “Without nothing, everything would be nothing.” - Dejan Stojanovic

132. “The world contained in a seed, Determined by its program.” - Dejan Stojanovic

133. “There are no clear borders, Only merging invisible to the sight.” - Dejan Stojanovic

134. “You are hurrying to the sweet place, To the nonsense chasing your spirit And in the nonsense you look for answers.” - Dejan Stojanovic

135. “It didn't help that I was never allowed to study anything remotely contemporary until the last year of university: there was never any sense of that leading to this. If anything, my education gave me the opposite impression, of an end to cultural history round about the time that Forster wrote A Passage to India. The quickest way to kill all love for the classics, I can see now, is to tell young people that nothing else maters, because then all they can do is look at them in a museum of literature, through glass cases. Don't touch! And don't think for a moment that they want to live in the same world as you! And so a lot of adult life -- if your hunger and curiosity haven't been squelched by your education -- is learning to join up the dots that you didn't even know were there.” - Nick Hornby

136. “One hand I extend into myself, the other toward others.” - Dejan Stojanovic

137. “You ask how it is possible to be your own father and son. You should seek answers, although it is better to anticipate some, to be the light and dream.” - Dejan Stojanovic

138. “My mathematics is simple: one plus one = one.” - Dejan Stojanovic

139. “Through everything I have passed but nowhere I have been.” - Dejan Stojanovic

140. “Nothing is made, nothing disappears. The same changes, at the same places, never stopping.” - Dejan Stojanovic

141. “Literature should be a kind of revolutionary manifesto against established morality and established society.” - Guo Moruo

142. “That was always my fear, that perhaps books would lead me astray, teaching me about a life that didn’t match reality.” - Stefanos Livos

143. “Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.” - John Green

144. “Every kingdom has three pillars: Poet, Sword and Law.” - Lara Biyuts

145. “Poirot, watching him, felt suddenly a doubt--an uncomfortable twinge. Was there, here, something that he had missed? Some richness of the spirit? Sadness crept over him. Yes, he should have become acquainted with the classics. Long ago. Now, alas, it was too late....” - Agatha Christie

146. “I gather," he added, "that you've never had much time to study the classics?""That is so.""Pity. Pity. You've missed a lot. Everyone should be made to study the classics, if I had my way."Poirot shrugged his shoulders."Eh bien, I have got on very well without them.""Got on! Got on? It's not a question of getting on. That's the wrong view all together. The classics aren't a ladder leading to quick success, like a modern correspondence course! It's not a man's working hours that are important--it's his leisure hours. That's the mistake we all make. Take yourself now, you're getting on, you'll be wanting to get out of things, to take things easy--what are you going to do then with your leisure hours?” - Agatha Christie

147. “Literary style is like crystal-ware: the cleaner the wineglass, the brighter the brilliance. As a reader, I agree with those who believe that a colour of the dress, which a character has on, as well as any enumeration and description of dishes at dinner or in the kitchen should be mentioned only in case if all this has a strong consequent relation to the plot, but as an author, I can’t help mentioning all this, with no particular reason, just for love for my characters, desiring to give them something nice and pleasant. Melancholy grows a platinum rose. Affection grows a double rose.” - Lara Biyuts

148. “What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be the means of achieving the former.” - Northrop Frye

149. “The classics can console. But not enough.” - Derek Walcott