140 Deep Literature Quotes That Stay With You
Some lines from books just stick with you.
They’re not flashy or complicated.
They just say something true about life that you’ve always felt but never put into words.
That’s what great literature does.
It captures the human experience in a way that hits different than anything else.
You don’t need to remember the whole story.
Sometimes one quote is enough to make you feel understood.
These deep literature quotes are the ones that do that. They’re timeless for a reason.
Short Literature Quotes About Life
“It is a corrupting thing to live one’s real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.” — George Orwell, Burmese Days
“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning against the balcony railing, holding the universe together.” — J.D. Salinger
“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.” — Alexandre Dumas
“Love is the most selfish of all the passions.” — Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
“The state is an organization of violence, monopoly in what it is pleased to call legitimate violence.” — John Gardner, Grendel
“Love is a teacher, but one must know how to acquire it, for it is acquired with difficulty, it is dearly bought, one must spend a great deal of labour and time on it, for we must love not only for a moment and fortuitously, but for ever.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound but mine as well. So please try not to hate me.” — Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
“Children are dying. That’s a succinct summary of humankind, I’d say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words.” — Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates
“He couldn’t understand what a building would be doing flying through the clouds. On the other hand, he would have been a little hard pressed to come up with any convincing explanation of his own presence, so he decided that he and the building were just going to have to accept each other.” — Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
“The lobby was empty, but Ford nonetheless weaved his way through it.” — Douglas Adams
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.” — Douglas Adams
“The ships hung in the sky, much the way that bricks don’t.” — Douglas Adams
“All the world will be your enemy, O Prince with a Thousand Enemies. And if they catch you, they will kill you. But first, they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed.” — Richard Adams, Watership Down
“So it goes.” — Kurt Vonnegut
“I am not contained between my hat and my boots.” — Walt Whitman
“We are but older children dear, Who fret to find our bedtime near.” — Lewis Carroll
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” — Jack Kerouac
“The color of one’s creed, neckties, eyes, thoughts, manners, speech, is sure to meet somewhere in time of space with a fatal objection from a mob that hates that particular tone.” — Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature
“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.” — Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.” — Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely
“Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.” — Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
“It was a pleasure to burn.” — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“I will not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.” — Frank Herbert, Dune
“There is probably no more terrible instance of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh.” — Frank Herbert, Dune
“What senses do we lack that we cannot see another world all around us?” — Frank Herbert
“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in a storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.” — Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear
“We understand how dangerous a mask can be. We all become what we pretend to be.” — Patrick Rothfuss
“This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification.” — Cormac McCarthy
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“Food is music to the body, music is food to the heart.” — Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” — Zora Neale Hurston
“There he goes, one of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, too rare to die.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
“All art is quite useless.” — Oscar Wilde
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” — H.P. Lovecraft
“When adults say, ‘Teenagers think they are invincible’ with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken.” — John Green
“He rests. He has traveled.” — James Joyce, Ulysses
“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable.” — Neil Gaiman, The Sandman
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” — Stephen King, The Dark Tower
“It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling.” — Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
“We have it within our power to begin the world over again.” — Thomas Paine
“The whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma made terrible by our mad attempt to interpret as though it had an underlying truth.” — Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
“The truest tales require time and familiarity to become what they are.” — Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
“My mother is a fish.” — William Faulkner
“As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free.” — William Shakespeare, The Tempest
“Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air.” — William Shakespeare, The Tempest
“It is a far, far better thing that I do than that I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than that I have ever known.” — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
“Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” — James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Leo Tolstoy
“You might consider that how to escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.” — David Foster Wallace
“Irony is the song of the bird who has grown to love its cage.” — David Foster Wallace
“I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon.” — Patrick Rothfuss, The Kingkiller Chronicle
“Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret.” — Joseph Heller, Catch-22
“We are all eaters of souls.” — Dan Simmons, The Terror
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” — James Joyce, The Dead
“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.” — David Foster Wallace
“That you are here—that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” — Walt Whitman
“The problem with having an open mind is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” — Terry Pratchett
“Speak to me not of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” — W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming
“There was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” — C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Deep Literature Quotes
“The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.” — Mark Twain
“The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes
“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.” — Ernest Hemingway
“Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.” — Joseph Addison
“Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.” — Benjamin Franklin
“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.” — C. S. Lewis
“It’s in literature that true life can be found. It’s under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.” — Gao Xingjian
“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.” — G. K. Chesterton
“Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.” — Salman Rushdie
“Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.” — Thornton Wilder
“Literature is the thought of thinking Souls.” — Thomas Carlyle
“Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.” — Isaac D’Israeli
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.” — Ernest Hemingway
“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.” — Cyril Connolly
“A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.” — H. L. Mencken
“Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.” — Andre Gide
“In literature as in love we are astounded by what is chosen by others.” — Andre Maurois
“Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.” — Robert Fitzgerald
“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” — G. K. Chesterton
“Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.” — Boris Pasternak
“Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.” — Samuel Butler
“Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing.” — Octavio Paz
“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.” — Ezra Pound
“Literature is the question minus the answer.” — Roland Barthes
“A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” — Mark Twain
“What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.” — E.M. Forster
“The duty of literature is to note what counts, and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference.” — Anatole France
“It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.” — Alfred North Whitehead
“The crown of literature is poetry.” — William Somerset Maugham
“Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.” — Oscar Wilde
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.” — Virginia Woolf
“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
“For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.” — Herman Melville
“The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.” — Eric Hoffer
“In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.” — George Bernard Shaw
“The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.” — Jean-Paul Sartre
“Books are humanity in print.” — Barbara W. Tuchman
“Good children’s literature appeals not only to the child in the adult, but to the adult in the child.” — Unknown
“While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.” — Cyril Connolly
“It is only by introducing the young to great literature, drama and music, and to the excitement of great science that we open to them the possibilities that lie within the human spirit enable them to see visions and dream dreams.” — Sir William Eric Kinloch Anderson
“Literature is, in fact, the fruit of leisure.” — Amelia Blanford Edwards
“Literature stands related to Man as Science stands to Nature; it is his history.” — John Henry Newman
“The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.” — Jean Cocteau
“An interchange of literature is the conversation of nations.” — Edward Counsel
“Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.” — Gao Xingjian
“Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.” — Salman Rushdie
“Literature: The art of putting old words into new places.” — Edward Blanchard
“Literature is a way to understand life, to appreciate living and therefore to participate in life to the fullest of your potential.” — Eric Chock
“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
“Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study; the fact that it consists of words, as we have seen, makes us confuse it with the talking verbal disciplines.” — Northrop Frye
“Literature, we said, is conscious mythology; it creates an autonomous world that gives us an imaginative perspective on the actual one.” — Northrop Frye
“Literature is at the center of those because literature is the great laboratory of myths, that is, the statement of reality in terms of man’s hopes and desires and fears.” — Northrop Frye
“Literature is an art of words, and the student of it may be interested primarily either in the art or in the words.” — Northrop Frye
“Literature is the total body of stories and symbols that provides hypotheses or models of human behavior and experience.” — Northrop Frye
“Literature is founded on the metaphor that arrests logic and the myth that arrests history; its works are objects of contemplation.” — Northrop Frye
“Literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.” — Cynthia Ozick
“Literature is a lie that tells the truth.” — Dorothy Allison
“Remarks are not literature.” — Gertrude Stein
“The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.” — Elizabeth Drew
“I believe all literature started as gossip.” — Rita Mae Brown
“Perversity is the muse of modern literature.” — Susan Sontag
“A people’s literature is a great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.” — Edith Hamilton
“Words, when well-chosen, have so great a Force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.” — Joseph Addison
“We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.” — Antonin Artaud
“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.” — P. G. Wodehouse
“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.” — Fernando Pessoa
“I speak and speak, but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.” — Italo Calvino
“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.” — Howard Nemerov
“People who are strangers to liquor are incapable of talking about literature.” — Mo Yan
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.” — Henry James
“Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity.” — P. T. Barnum
“Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.” — Herta Müller
“The sole substitute for an experience that we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can’t tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.” — Richard Ford
“Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.” — Jane Yolen
“Literature is news that stays news.” — Ezra Pound
“Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.” — Witold Gombrowicz
