Modernist Literature Quotes & Sayings

Of course, that's one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We're still waiting for the results. — Charles Finch

But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn't 'a nice man', and indeed was - perhaps rightly - scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers' work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a genius, and Voss one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century. — Thomas Keneally

Because it seems to me that to be human you have to be able to compromise. — William Boyd

Do not put your work off till to-morrow and the day after; for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor one who puts off his work: industry makes work go well, but a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin. — Hesiod

Free from what? What does that matter to Zarathustra! Clearly, however, shall your eye show to me: free for what? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Deny a man pleasure, the possession of woman's body and he will show you his true colors.
He will dismiss his frustration onto her, forcibly abuse her, offend her all at the cost of his desires, the fulfillment of his this basic appetite. And if you are not yet convinced then award him the opportunity of having her unconscious and observe what he does henceforth.
He would consider the situation to be in his favor and make most of it.
No, he wouldn't be tender then, you are mistaken, he would be insidious much like a wild animal set loose, unleashed and untameable that is what he would really be.
Or lure a woman with the riches of the world and she will prove to you, her infidelity. And that is how people are, antagonistic when forced to come in terms with denial, authoritative if the situation demands them to be and hypocrites, their naked faces unanimously declaring a common color, black. — Chirag Tulsiani

The fear of falling is the source of many a folly. It is a disaster. I suppose the wisest thing now is to live it over again, meditate upon it and be edified. It is thus that man distinguishes himself from the ape and rises, from discovery to discovery, towards the light. — Samuel Beckett

I have often thought," she said, "that women are the only true adults in the world, and men are a species of children. When babies are born, when the sick are struggling for life, when the old die, you will see women about, but rarely men. — Phyllis T. Smith

I was inspired by the androgyny of Yohji Yamanoto's designs to translate the clothing's dualities onto screen and image. I was playing with a multitude of influences for the S/S 2012 campaign, inspired by the modernist literature and architecture that is in itself a fusion of political and architectural mantras, both dreamy and concrete. — Collier Schorr

The people who most affected me were the ones who got right in there with me, who cried with me, but who also had a certain authority, who dared to say what needed saying. — Henri Nouwen

If the invention of derivatives was the financial world's modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, parallels the elusive nature of meaning in deconstrucitonism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always 'deferred,' moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings - a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an 'aporia,' from a Greek term meaning 'impasse.' There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect. — John Lanchester

I dont know why, but I feel some pain when she knew I was writing a lot of writing for her and when she suddenly wrote one, it's not for me. You can't go on with the situation like that, it could have kill you at the exact moment. — Ariel Seraphino

This compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without result was so cruel that one day, noticing a swelling over his stomach, he felt an actual joy in the idea that he had, perhaps, a tumor that would prove fatal, that he need not concern himself with anything further, since it was this malady that was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the not-distant end. If indeed, at his period, it often happened that, though without admitting it even to himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape not so much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of his struggle. — Marcel Proust

I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature. — Louis Menand

He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded him all the more cruelly since, being ignorant of his love, incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest, or of doing more than smile at it as at some childish joke, or deplore it as an act of insanity, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective state which existed for himself alone, whose reality there was nothing external to confirm; he suffered overwhelmingly, to the point at which even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry, from having to prolong his exile in this place to which Odette would never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely absent. — Marcel Proust

But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue. — Theodore Roosevelt

He pulled me up into the world of advanced literature, where you wrote essays about a line of Dante, where nothing could be made complex enough, where art dealt with the supreme, not in a high-flown sense because it was the modernist canon with which we were engaged, but in the sense of the ungraspable, which was best illustrated by Blanchot's description of Orpheus's gaze, the night of the night, the negation of the negation, which of course was in some way above the trivial and in many ways wretched lives we lived, but what I learned was that also our ludicrously inconsequential lives, in which we could not attain anything of what we wanted, nothing, in which everything was beyond our abilities and power, had a part in this world, and thus also in the supreme, for books existed, you only had to read them, no one but myself could exclude me from them. You just had to reach up. — Karl Ove Knausgard

There is not anti-semitism as an ideology. The civilized world must think that anti-semitism is stupid. — Elie Wiesel

Children become adults who become children again. — Kristin Hannah

Oh my God! She is so cute! Can you even imagine how adorable their little ginger babies would be?" April — Helena Hunting

Calm down. Ghosts don't ring the doorbell. — Kelly Moran