Art and Literature Quotes

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. ~ The Call of the Wild by Jack London What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee? ~ The Warden by Anthony Trollope Life may as properly be called an art as any other. ~ Amelia by Henry Fielding Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us. ~ Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. ~ Ulysses by James Joyce "I am too fond of reading books to care to write them." ~ The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde For his part, every beauty of art or nature made him thankful as well as happy, and that the pleasure to be had in listening to fine music, as in looking at the stars in the sky, or at a beautiful landscape or picture, was a benefit for which we might thank Heaven as sincerely as for any other worldly blessing. ~ Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray "Art is not imitation, but illusion." ~ Christie Johnstone by Charles Reade A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience. ~ Strictly Business by O. Henry His experience at the publishers had taught him one important truth, and that is that a big subject does not make a big writer, that all that any mind can contribute to the general thought of the world in literature is what is in itself, and if there is nothing in himself it is vain for the writer to go far afield for a theme. ~ That Fortune by Charles Dudley Warner