Who can understand religion unless he has sinned?
– Thonton Wilder The Cabala
Discover New Literary Quotes
Quotes From a Wide Range of Authors & Books
“We glimpse reality in childhood, in those sudden, flashing moments when the veil of appearances suddenly slips and we are aware of something behind, something indescribable and incomprehensible, but incomparably lovely. If you remember your childhood at all, you will remember those moments. All our life afterward is a search for the reality we saw without understanding and lost.”
– ELIZABETH GOUDGE Green Dolphin Street
…he always said that women were the most enthusiastic readers of fiction, not men.
– John Irving Avenue of Mysteries
Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.. Happiness is a scarlet cloak whose lining is in tatters.
– JULIAN BARNES Flaubert’s Parrot
You can’t be on no side . . . . That’s like not existing. We have to have an object of faith. Otherwise we’re not defined.
– John LeCarre Our Game
“To know something you had to able to go inside and feel, then step outside and look, and then do that again: go inside, feel, then outside and look.”
– LORRIE MOORE Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
…you don’t get to be a Christian by sitting in church any more than sleeping in a garage makes you a car.
– Garrison Keillor Lake Wobegon Summer 1956
“The trouble with discarding bad memories was evidently the good ones went with them.”
– Anne Tyler Noah’s Compass
