Novel

🇫🇷Marcel Proust

Literature

1871–1922

"On ne reçoit pas la sagesse, il faut la découvrir soi-même après un trajet que personne ne peut faire pour nous, ne peut nous épargner."

🇫🇷Simone de Beauvoir

Philosophy

Existentialism

1908–1986

"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion"

🇺🇸James Joyce

Literature

1870–1931

"His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before."

🇺🇸Thomas Mann

Literature

"The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed."

🇨🇴Gabriel García Márquez

Literature

magic realism

1927–2014

"But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love."

🇺🇸Saul Bellow

Literature

1915–2005

"Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything."

Anthony Trollope

Politics

1815–1882

"Aid from heaven you may have," he said, "by saying your prayers; and I don't doubt you ask for this and all other things generally. But an angel won't come to tell you who ought to be Chancellor of the Exchequer."

🇬🇧Graham Greene

Literature

1904–1991

"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead."

George Eliot

Journalism

Realism

1819–1880

"Howiver, I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: God Almighty made 'em to match the men."

🇦🇺J. M. Coetzee

Literature

b. 1940

"The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation."

🇺🇸Pat Conroy

Literature

1945–2016

"General Clark walked the campus like a retired deity and ignored the general run of cadets."

🇺🇸Carson McCullers

Literature

1917–1967

", Susan . Oxford Essential Quotations, 6.ª ed. eISBN 9780191866692. Oxford University Press."

🇬🇧William Golding

Literature

1911–1993

"He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet."

🇺🇸Marguerite Yourcenar

Literature

1903–1987

"At this period of his existence, meat and blood, entrails, and all that had ever lived and breathed disgusted him as food, for an animal dies in pain just as man does, and it repelled him to be digesting death's agony."

🇬🇧Elias Canetti

Literature

1905–1994

"One needs time to free oneself of wrong convictions. If it happens too suddenly, they go on festering."

🇪🇸Núria Añó

Literature

b. 1973

"The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts."

🇺🇸Elizabeth Gilbert

Literature

b. 1969

"The love that moves the sun and the other stars."

"…The resistance to English, the fear of English, has made us bad readers of English literature, because of our fear of contaminating the Spanish language, of losing it in the avalanche of North American influence…"

🇫🇷Émile Zola

Literature

Naturalism

1840–1902

"If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud."

🇬🇷Nikos Kazantzakis

Literature

1883–1957

"The highest point a man can obtain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!"

🇺🇸Lydia Maria Child

Social Activism

1802–1880

"Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of the character, though few can decypher even fragments of their meaning."

🇺🇸Joy Harjo

Literature

b. 1951

"Joy Harjo: Poems and Profile at Poets.org"

"The message of Vietnam is not that Americans will not take casualties; it is that the American people do not want the lives of their sons and daughters wasted."

"…there should be an absolute identification between the individual's experience and the writer's so that serves as the starting point for being able to write a short story or a novel later on…"

🇯🇵Murasaki Shikibu

Literature

973–1014

"I have never thought there was much to be said in favor of dragging on long after all one's friends were dead."

🇺🇸Becca Fitzpatrick

Literature

b. 1979

"Any happiness, no matter how brief, seemed better than the long, simmering torture of waking up day after day, knowing I could never have him."

🇬🇧John Gray (philosopher)

Philosophy

Analytic philosophy

b. 1948

"Science is not distinguished from myth by science being literally true and myth only a type of poetic analogy. While their aims are different, both are composed of symbols we use to deal with a slippery world."