Roman Literature Quotes & Sayings

Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I've no regrets. — Roman Payne

We can't worry away our problems, but we can worry anxiety into our mind and body. Thought energy is powerful. It's not easy to do, but we serve our well-being best, when we face our struggles head on and accept difficulties that are beyond our control and trust that we can garner the support and strength we need to jump the hurdles. Life needn't feel like a walking on a tightrope of tension. True peace is the calm within the storm. — Jaeda DeWalt

All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art. — Roman Payne

With the windows in his top of the range Audi firmly in place we slowly baked ourselves and chatted over why my hatred of golf was wrong, what made a good antihero and why Paul McCartney should just fuck off. — David Louden

It's thrilling. There's birth and death and frustration and victory in raising horses. It's like a little microcosm of life is built into the short lives of these creatures. — John Phillips

I am fully conscious that, not being a literary man , certain presumptuous persons will think that they may reasonably blame me; alleging that I am not a man of letters. Foolish folks! do they not know that I might retort as Marius did to the Roman Patricians by saying: That they, who deck themselves out in the labours of others will not allow me my own. They will say that I, having no literary skill, cannot properly express that which I desire to treat of, but they do not know that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words; and experience has been the mistress of those who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will cite her in all cases. — Leonardo Da Vinci

I'm not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun ... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus ... Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one. — Roman Payne

Pastor Bates was a careful reader of theology, literature and history. He delighted especially in Gibbon's woeful treatment of Christians in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, perusing the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters routinely and with glee. He enjoyed brilliant heretics as only the confidently faithful can, seeing in Gibbon the inspired rantings of a cheerleader working himself into a frenzy for a losing team, getting especially rabid come the dreaded fourth quarter, when Jesus begins running up the score. — Scott M. Morris

It's the journey that matters. Learning is more important than the test. Practice well, and the games will take care of themselves. — Tony Dungy

Terrence, the Roman slave who freed himself with his writings, once observed, "I am a human being. Nothing human is alien to me." That could be the motto of literature! — Julia Alvarez

I sat up in the strange bed fearing it had been a dream, afraid I would never see her again. Not because I wanted anything from her, only her presence. The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of ours that rolls onward towards death. — Roman Payne

Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique time? No. We show our home to our friends with the pride as if it were our home, which it is. Why then should we take less pride when reading a book written by some long-dead author? Is it not our book just as much, or even more so, than theirs? So the landowner says, 'Look at my beautiful home! Isn't it fine?' And not, 'Look at the home so-and-so has built.' Thus we shouldn't cry, 'Look what so-and-so has written. What a genius so-and-so is!' But rather, 'Look at what I have read! Am I not a genius? Have I not invented these pages? The walls of this universe, did I not build? The souls of these characters, did I not weave? — Roman Payne

Reading had come to mean something new to the women of the fourth and later centuries. In the imagination, it is deeply linked to travel: both were methods by which an individual could explore the world. Equally, both were a way to nudge a person out of an unquestioning view of the world. Writers knew that readers were tightly bound within the network of relationships and obligations which governed their position in the Roman world, and one of the goals of literature was to persuade readers to adopt a more thoughtful approach to these commitments and relationships. — Kate Cooper

I regained my soul through literature after those times I'd lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets. — Roman Payne

When he, whoever of the gods it was, had thus arranged in order and resolved that chaotic mass, and reduced it, thus resolved, to cosmic parts, he first moulded the Earth into the form of a mighty ball so that it might be of like form on every side ... And, that no region might be without its own forms of animate life, the stars and divine forms occupied the floor of heaven, the sea fell to the shining fishes for their home, Earth received the beasts, and the mobile air the birds ... Then Man was born: ... though all other animals are prone, and fix their gaze upon the earth, he gave to Man an uplifted face and bade him stand erect and turn his eyes to heaven. — Ovid

Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don't want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons. — Roman Payne

When I met a truly beautiful girl, I would tell her that if she spent the night with me, I would write a novel or a story about her. This usually worked; and if her name was to be in the title of the story, it almost always worked. Then, later, when we'd passed a night of delicious love-making together, after she'd gone and I'd felt that feeling of happiness mixed with sorrow, I sometimes would write a book or story about her. Sometimes her character, her way about herself, her love-making, it sometimes marked me so heavily that I couldn't go on in life and be happy unless I wrote a book or a story about that woman, the happy and sad memory of that woman. That was the only way to keep her, and to say goodbye to her without her ever leaving. — Roman Payne

Who's to say what a 'literary life' is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don't need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza! — Roman Payne

My loyalty lies with you, Princess," Tove smiled. "I trust you, and other Trylle will learn to trust you, once they see what you can do. — Amanda Hocking

The Alexandrian Library was a tragedy of some moment, for it was believed to contain the complete published works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, and a hundred others, who have come down to us in mangled form; full texts of the pre-Socratic philosophers, who survive only in snatches; and thousands of volumes of Greek, Egyptian, and Roman history, science, literature, and philosophy. — Will Durant

If you're opposed to the budget I submitted to the General Assembly, you're for a tax increase. — Matt Blunt

Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature. — Roman Payne

In other words, science tells us that Adam and Eve are fictions. That Saint Paul or Uncle Tom Cobley and all thought otherwise is irrelevant. They were wrong. — Michael Ruse

The secret of 'fusion' is the fact that the artist's eye sees in nature ... an inexhaustible wealth of tension, rhythms, continuities, and contrasts which can be rendered in line and color. — Susanne Katherina Langer

The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws - this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos. Easy to see why the Romans, usually so tolerant of foreign religions, persecuted the Christians mercilessly - how absurd to think a common criminal had risen from the dead, how appalling that his followers celebrated him by drinking his blood. The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it. In fact, I think the reason they took such drastic steps was because they were not only frightened but also terribly attracted to it. Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious. For all their logic, who lived in more abject terror of the supernatural than the Romans? The Greeks were different. They had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism. — Donna Tartt

I believe in intuition and approaching things as instant gratification. Just do the things you want to do, make the kind of pictures you want to make. — Edward Ruscha

Ethics cannot be based upon our obligations toward people, but they are complete and natural only when we feel this Reverence for Life and the desire to have compassion for and to help all creatures insofar as it is in our power. I think that this ethic will become more and more recognized because of its great naturalness and because it is the foundation of a true humanism toward which we must strive if our culture is to become truly ethical. — Albert Schweitzer

When Homer composed the Iliad and Odyssey, he was drawing on centuries of history and folklore handed down by oral tradition. When Nicolas Poussin painted The Rape of the Sabine Women, he was re-creating Roman history. When Marcel Proust dipped his petites madeleines into his tea, the taste and aroma set off a flood of memories and emotions from which modern literature has still not recovered. — Twyla Tharp

I've only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel. — Roman Payne

All emotions have an opposite. Anger and sadness are two of the same. When someone is angry, when they calm down, you may discover they're actually sad about some part in their life. Do you know what the other side of envy is?"
I shook my head.
"It's a lack of confidence, self-esteem. If he envies Silas's strength, then he's unsure about his own. If he's envious of Victor's wealth and what he can give you, it's because he's insecure about his lack of money and ability to give you those material things. Gabriel's greatest weakness is his own perception of himself. — C.L.Stone

Propping up a seat at the bar we devour chicken wings like life does dreams — David Louden

I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife. — Roman Payne

Wriggling around, two fingers deep in my back end like some teenage boy unsure what he should be tugging at inside his girlfriend's nether region I wrestled a fifty free. — David Louden

The American critic Dale Peck, author of Hatchet Jobs (2004), argues that reviewing finds its true character in critical GBH such as Fischer's [review of Martin Amis's Yellow Dog]. It represents a return to the prehistoric origins of reviewing in Zoilism - a kind of pelting of pretentious literature with dung, lest the writers get above themselves; it is to the novelist what the gown of humiliation was to the Roman politician - a salutary ordeal. Less grandly, bad reviews are fun, so long as you are not the author. There is, it must be admitted, a kind of furtive blood sport pleasure in seeing a novelist suffer. You read on. Whereas most of us stop reading at the first use of the word 'splendid' or 'marvellous' in a review. — John Sutherland

Although the disappearance of the true wildwood [in the British Isles] occurred in the Neolithic period, before humanity began to record its own history, creation myths in almost all cultures look fabulously back to a forested earth. In the ancient Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, the quest-story which begins world literature, Gilgamesh sets out on his journey from Uruk to the Cedar Mountains, where he has been charged to slay the Huwawa, the guardian of the forest. The Roman empire also defined itself against the forests in which its capital city was first established, and out of which its founders, the wolf-suckled twins, emerged. It was the Roman Empire which would proceed to destroy the dense forests of the ancient world. — Robert Macfarlane

Faith in an afterlife was important to Egyptians: they deliberately made their tombs the most permanent part of their built environment, and we find them in their literature very much concerned with what they could know about life after death, judgement and individual survival. Certainly they preserved their religion for most of the lifespan of their language, and they no more actively preached it abroad than they attempted to spread their language when they enlarged the boundaries of their power. But aspects of their faith did spread without the language none the less: their mother-goddess Isis became one of the most widely revered deities in the Roman empire, and has been seen as a root of the Christian cult of Mary as Mother of God. — Nicholas Ostler

The 'Muse' is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake. — Roman Payne