• Literary Quotations

     

    You mustn't depict life as it is, or as it should be, but life as it appears in your dreams.

    - Anton Chekhov (The Sea Gull)

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    Only the serious is really beautiful.

    - Anton Chekhov (The Sea Gull)

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    A man's character is his fate - Heraclitus (ancient Greek philospher)

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    Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late 
    hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to 
    where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is 
    nothing to remember except the story.

    - Tim O'Brien - (The Things They Carried)

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    No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored 
    solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending soley on himself and 
    thereby learning his true and hidden strength. Learning for instance, to eat 
    when he's hungry and sleep when he's sleepy.

    - Jack Kerouac - (Alone on a Mountain Top)

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    What we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of 
    truth.

    - Azar Nafisi - (Reading Lolita in Tehran)

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    Consider the use of letters.
    All principles demand them.

    Though they travel a thousand miles or more,
    nothing in this world can stop them.

    They traverse
    the thousands of years.

    Look at them one way,
    and they clarify laws for the future.

    Look at them another,
    and they provide models from old masters.

    The art of letters has saved governments from ruin
    and propagates morals.

    Through letters, there is no road
    too difficult to travel,

    no idea too confusing
    to be ordered.

    It comes like rain from clouds;
    it renews the vital spirit.

    Inscribed on bronze and marble,
    it honors every virtue.

    It sings in flute and strings
    and every day is made newer.

    - Lu Chi - (Wen Fu / The Art of Writing)

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    Every word is an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness. - Samuel 
    Beckett

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    Each man is the bard of his own existence. - Cormac McCarthy

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    Baby Shoes, For Sale, Never Worn. - Ernest Hemmingway aka Papa (winning a 
    bet that he could not write a 6-word short story... yeah, he won).