Diany > Diany's Quotes

“Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand; pen mighter than the sword and so forth. ”
― Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair

“Without literature, life is hell.”
― Charles Bukowski

“People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

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

“Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.”
― Mario Puzo

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

“Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.”
― Laurie Anderson

“The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Sir, I shall not defeat you - I shall transcend you.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

“People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.”
― Edgar Rice Burroughs

“In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.”
― C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

“Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.”
― W.B. Yeats

“Do you realize that all great literature — "Moby Dick," "Huckleberry Finn," "A Farewell to Arms," "The Scarlet Letter," "The Red Badge of Courage," "The Iliad and The Odyssey," "Crime and Punishment," the Bible, and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" — are all about what a bummer it is to be a ...human being?”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I do not write with ease, nor am I ever pleased with anything I write. And so I rewrite.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.
”
― Walt Whitman

“From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“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 Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Books and movies, they are not mere entertainment. They sustain me and help me cope with my real life.”
― Arlaina Tibensky

“This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“There is no failure except in no longer trying.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“To love makes one solitary.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood, - by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Clarissa had a theory in those days - they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not 'here, here, here'; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoke to, some women in the street, some man behind a counter - even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps - perhaps.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
― George Orwell, 1984