Prose

Quotes & Thinkers in Prose

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"A poet can survive everything but a misprint."

"One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier. (22 October 1846)"

44 quotes

🇩🇪Friedrich Hölderlin

Philosophy

Idealism

1770–1843

"Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste."

"If I know what love is, it is because of you."

"People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there."

"The world is a fine place. The only thing wrong with it is us. How little justice and humility there is in us, how poorly we understand patriotism!"

"Among a number of intelligent suggestions there was finally this one too, strange as it may seem, that Chichikov might be Napoleon in disguise..."

38 quotes

🇺🇸Thomas Mann

Literature

"The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed."

127 quotes

🇨🇴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."

"You are your own law, so you'll be your own judge."

"Our civilization … is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition. In order to question it."

"By the sense of mystery I understand the experience of certain places and times when one's whole nature seems to be in touch with a prescence, a genius loci, a potency."

"The world's a puzzle; no need to make sense out of it." - Socrates"

"That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays."

"I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them."

"As a writer you wait around for inspiration; this book is about what happens when a character taps a writer on the shoulder and calls her into being; it's about the character creating a novelist."

"Why has our space of debate become so narrow?...The new coronavirus infection is totally under control in China. What is it scared of, despite that?"

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

Literature

1861–1907

"The Genealogy of Coleridge Family and Coleridge links"

"I love you. I love you. I send this message through my fingers and into his, up his arm and into his heart. Hear me. I love you. And I'm sorry to leave you."

"I think fiction is the thing you invent to fit the shape of what you learned and nonfiction is the thing you invent to fit the shape of what you found or maybe even what you can’t run away from…"

"You are a republic of voices tonight. Unfortunately, that republic is Italy."

"When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it's not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end."

"Whoever said that the past isn't dead had it backward. It's the future that's already dead, already played out."

14 quotes

🇺🇸Jonathan Safran Foer

Literature

b. 1977

"I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time......why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future."

"The Communist-Fascists, who are managers of the press, remove unwanted editors and monopolize the printing base, as it is widely practiced today in Belarus."

"I’m a bit of a lone wolf…I don’t give interviews or do publicity unless I have a book out—too distracting. My desk is where the real work happens."

5 quotes

🇺🇸Herman Melville

creative and professional writing

Romanticism

1819–1891

"You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the truth in."

"Hell is not a place, it's a state of mind and body; hell is obsession with a voice, a face, a name."

"I worry I don’t see things the way everyone else does."

"It's not the despair, Laura, I can stand the despair. It's the hope."

"There's just one rule for politicians all over the world: Don't say in Power what you say in Opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible."

"That is the meaning of the coming of Christ.. ..that the word becomes flesh and man is saved from abstraction."

"I OWE Christianity a debt, and so, I believe, does the world we have lived in for the last 2000 years."

"My father...was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings."

"A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies."

"The bottom line is that we never fall for the person we're supposed to."

48 quotes

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