Best Literature Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.”

“Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't.”

“Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people”

“Grief is paradoxical: you know you must let go, and yet letting go cannot happen all at once. The literature of mourning enacts that dilemma; its solace lies in the ritual of remembering the dead and then saying,”

“When the star dies,”

“But those who believe that flowers grow in vases don't understand anything about literature. The library has now become her first-aid kit, and she's going to give the children a little of the medicine that helped her recover her smile when she thought she'd lost it forever.”

“Her constant orders for beheading are shocking to those modern critics of children's literature who feel that juvenile fiction should be free of all violence and especially violence with Freudian undertones. Even the Oz books of L. Frank Baum, so singularly free of the horrors to be found in Grimm and Andersen, contain many scenes of decapitation. As far as I know, there have been no empirical studies of how children react to such scenes and what harm if any is done to their psyche. My guess is that the normal child finds it all very amusing and is not damaged in the least, but that books like”

“Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“With the rum bottle empty, Marsh had moved on to the Guinness in the kitchen cupboard. After a bottle and a half, he’d decided that action was required.the most satisfying sort of action he could think of was ending the little boy’s life.”

“He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”

“Kill me, or you are a murderer.”

“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.”

“A quote is just ink until the moment makes it matter. It’s not the words that change—it’s where you are when they find you.”

“Things are sometimes faded but they will always become clear, where there seems nothing but bad look closer, you’re sure to find good.”

“By incorporating vivid and descriptive imagery, I strive to enable readers to 'see' and 'feel' the world I have created, aiming to make the message more tangible and relatable.”

“We were never supposed to be in love; for everything that exists inside a heart eventually dies.”

“I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.”

“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.”

“Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them.”

“Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can't understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.”

“I only wrote prose before I met you.”

“The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.”

“Poetry isn’t an island, it is the bridge.”

“Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.”

“For my part, I love to give myself up to the illusion of poetry. A hero of fiction that never existed is just as valuable to me as a hero of history that existed a thousand years ago.”

“Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the”

“Poetry, if it has too many layers, should at least lead readers to the openings of the caves the poet built with words and then let them explore on their own! If it does not happen, the travellers might return even without knocking at all!”