BY: TYLER FYFE
Those who read understand— literature is meant to nourish a starved reality with fresh perspective. Because outlook is a fragile thing. The mundanity of work, the blandness of a tired relationship, the familiarity of experience can lead to life congealing inside the human mind. Without literature, without imagination, the world is just shapes and shadows. Great writers lean into their words. Even if it means they tip over an edge of thought from which they cannot return.
Submitted by our readers, these are some of the most powerful quotes in literature that should defibrillate your stale outlook.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” —Oscar Wilde, 1890.
ON THE ROAD
“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, 1957.
EAST OF EDEN
“When a child first catches adults out— when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”—John Steinbeck, 1952.
FINISH
“We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.”— Charles Bukowski, 1966.
DIFFERENT SEASONS
“Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.” —Stephen King, 1982.
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. ” – Harper Lee, 1960.
BRAVE NEW WORLD
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”- Aldous Huxley, 1931.
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE
“And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.” -Kurt Vonnegut, 1969.
THE LITTLE PRINCE
“All grown-ups were once children…but only few of them remember it.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943.
Sources: quotesgram.com, danivillela.com, cinearchive.org, telegraph.co.uk, theguardian.com, wordpress.com, ankakedisi.com
