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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Power of literature24 quotes
The pen is mightier than the sword. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton · 1839A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kafka · 1904My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. — Joseph Conrad · 1897A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window. — Stewart Brand · 1994When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before. — Clifton Fadiman · 1957Hamlet is a name: His speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet. — William Hazlitt · 1817All 24 quotes →Books10 quotes
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kafka · 1904When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before. — Clifton Fadiman · 1957Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are. — John Milton · 1644The reading of good books is like a conversation with the best men of past centuries-in fact like a prepared conversation, in which they reveal only the best of their thoughts. — Rene Descartes · 1637Reach for the book: It is a weapon. — Bertolt Brecht · 1935A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. — Italo Calvino · 1981All 10 quotes →Writing4 quotes
Good prose is like a windowpane. — George Orwell · 1946Words, so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become, in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. — Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1848Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do. — Jhumpa Lahiri · 2012I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, "You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and I wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's the truth." — Maya Angelou · 2013Literature3 quotes
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong. — F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1938Words, so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become, in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. — Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1848Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do. — Jhumpa Lahiri · 2012Power of words2 quotes
Words, so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become, in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. — Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1848Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do. — Jhumpa Lahiri · 2012Self-discovery2 quotes
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kafka · 1904Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth. — Marcel Proust · 1922Broken heart1 quote
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive. — James Baldwin · 1963Good writing1 quote
Good prose is like a windowpane. — George Orwell · 1946History1 quote
You can't get at the truth by writing history; only the novelist can do that. — Gerald Brenan · 1986Libraries1 quote
A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window. — Stewart Brand · 1994Nature of truth1 quote
You can't get at the truth by writing history; only the novelist can do that. — Gerald Brenan · 1986Novels1 quote
You can't get at the truth by writing history; only the novelist can do that. — Gerald Brenan · 1986Power of art1 quote
The only substitute for an experience we ourselves have never lived through is art, literature. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1972Reading1 quote
Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth. — Marcel Proust · 1922The human condition1 quote
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive. — James Baldwin · 1963Truth1 quote
You can't get at the truth by writing history; only the novelist can do that. — Gerald Brenan · 1986Universality of literature1 quote
I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, "You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and I wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's the truth." — Maya Angelou · 2013