Good Literature Quotes

Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.

Good literature makes your head throb heartlike

In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.

God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.

All good Literature rests primarily on insight.

When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.

My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.

The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.

We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.

‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

Any literature, when it arrives at being good literature, transcends genre.

For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature.

The short story, its course plotted and its form proscribed, has become too efficient... but efficiency is not the most, it is perhaps the least, important among the undoubted elements of good literature

The age was still dark and reeked of the havoc and misfortunes of the Goths who had put all good literature to destruction. But, by God's goodness, in my time light and dignity were returned to letters, and I see there such improvement that today I would have great difficulty being admitted to the most elementary classes--I, who in my time was reputed to be (and not wrongly) to be the most knowledgeable person of the century.

Christ and the life of Christ is at this moment inspiring the literature of the world as never before, and raising it up a witness against waste and want and war. It may confess Him, as in Tolstoi's work it does, or it may deny Him, but it cannot exclude Him; and in the degree that it ignores His spirit, modern literature is artistically inferior. In other words, all good literature is now Christmas literature.

Science is not just there for technology. It's part of what addressing who you are in the universe and understanding your place in the cosmos. Good art, good literature, good music - all of that is for that and science is a part of it.

Isn't connecting people to distant lands and culture one of the strengths of good literature?

The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behooves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c'est l homme, what is likely to happen if l homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.

I certainly don't condemn anyone who listens to audiobooks. It seems to me that any way we get good literature in our brain is worthwhile.

No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artists.

Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.

I think any good literature, whether it's for children or for adults, will appeal to everybody. As far as children's literature goes, adults should be able to read it and enjoy it as much as a child would.

It did occur to me that the effect of good literature may be as dizzying as that of alcohol.

In my profession it isn’t a question of telling good literature from bad. Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money — it’s always been like that. What do I, an agent, get out of a literary genius who won’t be discovered for another hundred years? I’ll be dead myself then. Successful incompetents are what I need.

Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.

Just as composers go to concerts and artists visit galleries, writers read. You will learn, in the most enjoyable way, more about style and language from reading good literature than you will ever acquire from workshops and how-to books.

Climbing Jacob''s Ladder is a gutsy, glowing account of one man's encounter with a potent spiritual practice and how it transformed his life. This is a precious book - that rare combination of solid wisdom and good literature.

Ways to be actively involved in the solution: 1. Consider adoption. 2. Be a regular giver of your money to Crisis Pregnancy Centers. 3. Volunteer in a Crisis Pregnancy Center. 4. Be involved in spreading truth with good literature. 5. Make your presence know at the abortion clinics in town (by) writing or phoning or visiting and talking, if you can, with those who work there. 6. Dream a new kind of ministry. 7. Pray!

There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.