Literature and Words

The words “question” and “quest” are cognates. Only through inquiry can we discover truth.

My stories have led me through my life. They shout, I follow. They run up and bite me on the leg— I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit.

I have a theory that you can make any sentence seem profound by writing the name of a dead philosopher at the end of it.

English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots; and those whom it once colonized are carving out large territories within the language for themselves. The Empire is striking back.

No intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated.

In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time a tremendous whack.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

Nothing lays itself open to the charge of exaggeration more than the language of naked truth.

Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt .

Another ancient and extensive class of languages, united by a greater number of resemblances than can well be altogether accidental, may be denominated the Indo-european, comprehending the Indian, the West Asiatic, and almost all the European languages.

More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our own particular path than we have yet got ourselves. E. M.

 

The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.

I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Literature is well enough, as a time-passer, and for the improvement and general elevation and purification of mankind, but it has no practical value.

In literature imitations do not imitate.