Literature About Literature Quotes

“It’s hard to say something about Pushkin to a person who doesn’t know anything about him. Pushkin is a great poet. Napoleon is not as great as Pushkin. Bismarck compared to Pushkin is a nobody. And the Alexanders, First, Second and Third, are just little kids compared to Pushkin. In fact, compared to Pushkin, all people are little kids, except Gogol. Compared to him, Pushkin is a little kid.
And so, instead of writing about Pushkin, I would rather write about Gogol.
Although, Gogol is so great that not a thing can be written about him, so I'll write about Pushkin after all.
Yet, after Gogol, it’s a shame to have to write about Pushkin. But you can’t write anything about Gogol. So I’d rather not write anything about anyone.”
― Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings

“Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Primeiro você precisa saber a sua própria língua de uma maneira absoluta. Depois, esquecer que sabe a língua e começar tudo de novo, para dar aquele passo novo na língua. Do contrário, você seria uma pessoa formal, escrevendo muito bem, mas uma coisa chatérrima. Portanto, é todo um processo de construir e destruir. Isso leva anos e, quando você está velhinho, parece que aí você consegue escrever mais ou menos bem. Quando se está com aquelas manchas nas mãos, que aparecem com os anos e que eu chamo de "as flores do sepulcro".”
― Hilda Hilst, Fico Besta Quando Me Entendem: Entrevistas com Hilda Hilst

“A reverie is one soul's river -
a word is one heart's vein.”
― Laura Chouette

“We must thank fate (and the author’s thirst for universal fame) for his not having turned to the Ukrainian dialect as a medium of expression, because then he would have been lost. When I want a good nightmare I imagine Gogol penning in Little Russian dialect volume after volume of Dikanka and Mirgorod stuff about ghosts haunting the banks of the Dniepr, burlesque Jews and dashing Cossacks.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol

“There was something highly literary in the idea of succumbing to a fateful solitary misery, like working myself to death making hats.”
― Amanda Sellet, By the Book

“You have a false understanding of what it means to read. Reading is not just turning printed signs into sounds. Reading is something deeper. True reading means hearing what the book has to say and pondering it— perhaps even having a conversation in your mind with the author. It means learning about the world— the world as it really is, not as you wish it to be.”
― J.M. Coetzee, The Death of Jesus

“A Tom Sawyerish figure she imagined growing up on some widwestern farm, reading adventure books and butchering chickens, pulling the braids of milkmaids and leaving his hometown to travel the world; a more devout and sober Hemingway, in search of a deeper meaning, but never losing sight of where he came from.”
― Susie Yang, In These Hallowed Halls: A Dark Academia Anthology

“You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy."
"Or just find a white writer. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn't threatening.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“I walked around the library looking for books. I pulled them off the shelves, one by one. But they were all tricks. They were very dull. There were pages and pages of words that didn't say anything. Or if they did say something they took too long to say it and by the time they said it you already were too tired to have it matter at all. I tried book after book. Surely, out of all those books, there was one.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Our receptivity to praise stands in no relationship to our vulnerability to mean disdain and spiteful abuse. No matter how stupid such abuse is, no matter how plainly impelled by private rancors, as an expression of hostility it occupies us far more deeply and lastingly than praise. Which is very foolish, since enemies are, of course, the necessary concomitant of any robust life, the very proof of its strength.”
― Thomas Mann

“Se ciò che ci distingue dagli altri membri del regno animale è la parola, allora la letteratura - e la poesia, in particolare, è la sua forma più alta - è, per dirla senza mezzi termini, lo scopo della nostra specie.”
― Iosif Brodskij

“The rebellion against fascism is immensely important to society when its grip on our dreamers strangles the creativity out of our ambition, finally snuffing out all progress as we know it, and as if implanting a tombstone, parks institutions in its place.”
― Oliver Oyanadel

“বাড়িটা চাঁদের আলোয় ঝিলমিল করছিল
বাড়িটা চাঁদের আলোয় ঝিলমিল করছিল ।
আর তার মধ্যে ঝিলমিল করছিল আহ্লাদ,
আমার খুকি উজ্বল ।
আহ্লাদে ঝিলমিল বাড়ির ভেতরে ঝিলমিল
চাঁদের আলোর সঙ্গে,
আমার খুকিকে আশীর্বাদ করো আমার খুকিকে আশীর্বাদ করো উজ্বল,
আ্‌লাদে ঝিলমিল আমার খুকিকে আশীর্বাদ করো
বাড়ির মধ্যে চাঁদের আলোয় ঝিলমিল।
ওর প্রিয় বর উল্লসিত হতে ভালোবাসে যখন ভাবে
আর সে সব সময়েই ভাবে যখন জানতে পারে আর সে সব সময়
জানে যে ওর আশীর্বাদপুত বউই এখানে যাকিছু আর ও পুরোটাই
ওর বউয়ের, আর তার সঙ্গে সেঁটে থাকে আশীর্বাদপূত খুকির মতন ।
যদি আমি ওকে বলতুম, পিকাসোর একটা সম্পন্ন প্রতিকৃতি
আমি যদি ওকে বলতুম ও কি পছন্দ করত । ও কি পছন্দ করত যদি আমি ওকে বলতুম।
ও কি পছন্দ করত যদি নেপোলিয়ান হতেন নেপোলিয়ান হতেন হতেন ও পচন্দ করত।
যদি নেপোলিয়ান যদি ওকে বলতুম যদি বলতুম যদি নেপোলিয়ান । ও কি পছন্দ করত যদি আমি ওকে বলতুম যদি বলতুম যদি নেপোলিয়ান । ও কি পছন্দ করত যদি নেপোলিয়ান যদি নেপোলিয়ান যদি আমি ওকে বলতুম । যদি আমি ওকে বলতুম যদি নেপোলিয়ান যদি নেপোলিয়ান যদি ওকে বলতুম । যদি ওকে বলতুম ও কি পছন্দ করত ও কি পচন্দ করত যদি আমি ওকে বলতুম ।
এখন ।
এখন নয় ।
আর এখন ।
এখন ।
ঠিক যেমন যেমন রাজারা ।
পুরোটা অনুভব করতে পারে ।
রাজাদের মতন হুবহু ।
তাই তোমাকে খোঁজা”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“All the things he did not see...

(a black bear, two hawks, horsemen, a trio of summer cabins far below him...)”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“Of late, it was not to be denied, literature had seemed a fading light....”
― Henry James

“The book you promised me has come. I was intending to read it at my convenience and I opened it on arrival without meaning to do any more than just get an idea of its contents. The next thing I knew the book itself had charmed me into a deeper reading of it there and then. How lucid its style is...”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales AD Lucilium. VOLUME I

“What, after all, is the creation? What is man; a creature fabricated by God; or is he the product of millions of years of evolution… and is he heading towards what we might call superman? or towards his doom?’’

Do Fate and Characters act and react upon each other? “The fault, dear Brutus, lies in ourselves and not in stars.’’

The outer story of ambiguity on human life and sometimes his complex personality beyond analysis together leads to another parlance of inner story. As such, the book Realization of Author Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri, intensifies the character along with his refinement of nature. One of author’s favorable quotes: “Thunder is good; thunder is impressive. But it is lightening that does the work.”
― Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri, Realization (Documents Based on Self-Scholarly Effects with Google Scholar Citations.): William Shakespeare, Rabindranath Tagore and John Keats: On Selected Works of the Legends.

“I Killed Poe
Hearken now I do confess:
That I killed Poe (I could do no less).
After all, he murdered the dear Fortunato,
And then wrote of it in arrogant bravado.

Thus, upon the midnight drear I did go,
To greet the poet upon the stroke.
Indeed, the time had long been set,
To meet the man upon his step.

Misfortunes thus, had made him say,
"You look well friend," only yesterday.
Yet, wrote he falsehoods as to my concern,
About my actions that he loathed and spurned.

But alas, the man had bared the door,
And thus I tapped - ta-ta tap-tap - and nothing more.

It was some moments or so it seemed,
That I demoned to the window to watch him dream.
It amused me so to hear him talk,
To run his gamut of raving thought.

To watch the terror slow creep in,
Bedevil the mind that harbored sin.
Soon I entered into his graven room,
And perched atop his timely tomb.

A beating of wings and he lay on the floor,
And this by merely tapping - ta-ta tap-tap - forevermore.

--Poems on the Run Vol. I”
― Douglas Laurent

“And so, with a slow sweep of the arm that remained forever etched in my memory, he took out a match, lit it, and tossed it onto the pile of books. With a quiet huff...ff...ff the flames rippled over the pages, catching first the old books with the brown paper whose smell I loved so much. I vividly remember how Danko's Burning Heart was engulfed in flames that then licked at Luce's skirt who, desperately trying to protect herself from the fire in pages of Romain Rolland's book, held Pierre tightly to her breast. I watched as the fire spread to the intertwined lovers Pierre and Natasha, Heathcliff and Cathrine Earnshaw, Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, abelard and Heloise, Tristan and Isolde, Salaman and Absal, Vis and Ramin, Vamegh and Azra, Zohreh and Manuchehr, shirin and Farhad, Leyli and Majnun, Arthur and Gemma, the Rose and the Little Prince, before they had the chance to smell or kiss each other again, or whisper. "I love you" one last time.”
― Shokoofeh Azar, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree

“Some artist's greatest work is their own persona and I can only think of what a fleeting and impermanent canvas they've chosen.”
― Connor de Bruler

“It is also part of the humanities’ mission to appreciate exceptions: it would be tragic if literary scholars became so infatuated with charts and graphs that they forgot to mention that Wuthering Heights is rather unlike other novels of its time.”
― Ted Underwood

“Its very unfortunate to earn Fame as Comforts, Happiness and Easy Life...all these can never meet on a same line.”
― Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri, The Immortal Fly: Eternal Whispers: Based on True Events of a Family

“Sonnet of Grammar

Grammar, Oh Grammar,
Whatever you are,
Go away and bother,
The intellectual scholar.
I ain't no intellectual,
Nor am I a scholar,
So bother me not,
With your snobbish affair.
My words come from the soil,
My structure is born on the street.
I didn't even graduate college,
What do I know about literary creed!
Time has come for me to put you in place.
Be an aid to discourse, not an uptight nutcase!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Giants in Jeans: 100 Sonnets of United Earth

“Sonnet of Poetry

Poet is no servant of the dictionary,
Dictionary is servant to the poet.
Poet is no servant of language,
Language is servant to the poet.
It's poetry that makes the language,
Language makes no poetry, my friend.
Poet exists not to serve a linguist's whim,
But to breathe life into human language.
I've said repeatedly, language has limitations,
Only with poetry we can surpass some of 'em.
Sticklers for grammar make lousy poets,
If feeling doesn't surpass grammar, poetry it ain't.
Poetry is the most potent of all literary forms.
If prose is candle light, poetry is dawn.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables

“Je hebt uiteindelijk je begeerte lief en niet het begeerde.'
Het kwam er veel plechtiger uit dan bedoeld. Meteen had hij spijt het te hebben gezegd. Simon wist dat het waar was, maar wist ook dat het aanmatigend was om te zeggen dat het waar was.
Lizzie fronste. Zij vroeg of hij het nog eens wilde zeggen. Toen zei ze: 'Nou, dat vind ik niet. Ik hou gewoon van jou.”
― Joost Zwagerman, Vals licht

“Načini in oblike pripovedovanja se spreminjajo s časom in razmerami, potreba po pripovedi in pripovedovanju pa ostaja, pripoved teče naprej in pripovedovanju ni konca. Tako je včasih videti, kakor da človeštvo od prvega pobliska zavesti skozi stoletja pripoveduje samo sebi v milijon variantah vzporedno z dihanjem svojih pljuč in z ritmom svojega utripa ves čas isto pripoved.”
― Ivo Andrić, Izbrana krajša proza

“It seems this whole literary endeavor amounts to nothing more than taking a valuable commodity like paper and turning it into worthless rubbish by writing on it.”
― Donnally Miller, The Devil's Workshop

“Literature in translation is never quite the same. There are nuances, emotions, and intricacies that are lost in the process. The writer's original words carry a depth that can only be truly felt and understood in their native language”
― Asif Hossain, Serenade of Solitude

“Literature is an act of resistance against dehumanization. War and trauma numb our senses and freeze our feelings. Literature restores us, awakens our feelings, and returns to us our sense of individuality and integrity.”
― Azar Nafisi