Nobel Laureates In Literature

"A Levantine Nobel Prize laureate, Georgis Seferis, a Greek who lived for many years in Egypt, wrote: "And things that came later had the self-same/calmness which you see here,/they had this calmness because no soul/was left to us to think about,/none except the strength to carve some signs in stones/that touched now more deeply, beneath remembrance." Thus wrote Georgis Seferis, a true Levantine."

"I want no more than to speak simply to be granted that grace. Because we've loaded our songs with so much music that they're slowly sinking and we've decorated our art so much that its features have been eaten away by gold and it's time to say our few words because tomorrow our soul sets sail. ...I think so much these days about the great river, that symbol which moves forward among herbs and greenery and beasts that graze and drink, and men who sow and harvest, great tombs even and small habitations of the dead. That current which goes its way and which is not so different from the blood of men..."

"Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life."

"I awoke with this marble head in my hands which exhausts my elbows and I do not know where to set it down."

"There is something "disembodied, triumphant, dead"—Whitman's words—about Glück's usual voice [...]. She sees experience from very far off, almost through the wrong end of a telescope, transparently removed in space or time."

"She was in my poetry seminar at Columbia and I felt that then her poetry was tremendously involved with a kind of female anger but also victimization which I think is something that really has to come out in poetry, but it's not primarily what I would hope to find in women's poems in the future. I'd like to find something much more complicated and dense. But I think there's going to be a lot of that anger in poetry and some of it will be very powerful poetry."

"I’m an opportunist—I always hope I’ll get material out of any activity. I never know where writing is going to come from"

"When I’m trying to put a poem or a book together, I feel like a tracker in the forest following a scent, tracking only step to step. It’s not as though I have plot elements grafted onto the walls elaborating themselves. Of course, I have no idea what I’m tracking, only the conviction that I’ll know it when I see it."

"Don’t prejudge your stimuli. Just trust where your attention goes."

"I caution you as I was never cautioned you will never let go, you will never be satiated."

"The master said You must write what you see. But what I see does not move me. The master answered Change what you see."

"My bed usually looks like Proust’s bed; my whole life is lived there."

"(You once said to me on the phone, “Follow your enthusiasms.”) I believe that. I used to be approached in classes by women who felt they shouldn’t have children because children were too distracting, or would eat up the vital energies from which art comes. But you have to live your life if you’re going to do original work. Your work will come out of an authentic life, and if you suppress all of your most passionate impulses in the service of an art that has not yet declared itself, you’re making a terrible mistake. When I was young I led the life I thought writers were supposed to lead, in which you repudiate the world, ostentatiously consecrating all of your energies to the task of making art. I just sat in Provincetown at a desk and it was ghastly—the more I sat there not writing the more I thought that I just hadn’t given up the world enough. After two years of that, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be a writer. So I took a teaching job in Vermont, though I had spent my life till that point thinking that real poets don’t teach. But I took this job, and the minute I started teaching—the minute I had obligations in the world—I started to write again."

"Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface.It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth."

"From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved."

"I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn't expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to respond again, remembering after so long how to open again in the cold light of earliest spring—afraid, yes, but among you again crying yes risk joyin the raw wind of the new world."

"Intense love always leads to mourning."

"Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer."

"The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams."

"We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory."

"(You said once that the life of a poet oscillates between ecstasy and agony, and what mitigates those extremes is the necessary daily business of living.) Yes. Friends, conversation, gardens. Daily life. It’s what we have. I believe in the world. I trust it to provide me."

"It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment—the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It's like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims towards it, it backs away."

"I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen; for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied. There is no moment in which their first home is felt to be the museum."

"The poem will not survive on content but through voice. By voice I mean the style of thought, for which a style of speech never convincingly substitutes."

"You have to live your life if you're going to do original work. Your work will come out of an authentic life, and if you suppress all of your most passionate impulses in the service of an art that has not yet declared itself, you're making a terrible mistake. When I was young I led the life I thought writers were supposed to lead, in which you repudiate the world, ostentatiously consecrating all of your energies to the task of making art. I just sat in Provincetown at a desk and it was ghastly—the more I sat there not writing the more I thought that I just hadn't given up the world enough. After two years of that, I came to the conclusion that I wasn't going to be a writer. So I took a teaching job in Vermont, though I had spent my life till that point thinking that real poets don't teach. But I took this job, and the minute I started teaching—the minute I had obligations in the world—I started to write again."

"The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last."

"Father has his arm around Tereze. She squints. My thumb is in my mouth: my fifth autumn. Near the copper beech the spaniel dozes in shadows. Not one of us does not avert his eyes."

"One of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing."

"A poet fascinated with border states between existence and nonexistence."

"Once Jews no longer obeyed the imperatives of their religion, they were virtually obliged to create new forms of identity, turning accommodation from means to end. Literature was a proving ground for the reinvention of the self. One-tenth of the Nobel Prize winners for literature in the twentieth century were born Jews, but only two of them-Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1966) and Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978)-wrote in a Jewish language and only about half thought of themselves as Jews."

"The Hebrew writers who I feel should be more widely appreciated my own mentors, I suppose-are Micha Berdyczewski, Yosef Haim Brenner, and, of course, Shmuel Yosef Agnon."

"The old man … received the Sabbath with sweet song and chanted the hallowing tunefully over raisin wine; while it was still day he hallowed and the sun came to gaze at his glass. … The table was well spread with all manner of fruit, beans, greenstuffs and good pies, plum water tasting like wine, but of flesh and of fish there was never a sign. … in truth it is in no way obligatory to eat flesh and fish … He and she, meaning the old man and the old woman, had never tasted flesh since growing to maturity."

"Lest I slight any creature, I must also mention the domestic animals, the beasts and birds from whom I have learned. Job said long ago (35:11): «Who teacheth us more than the beasts of the earth, And maketh us wiser than the fowls of heaven?» Some of what I have learned from them I have written in my books, but I fear that I have not learned as much as I should have, for when I hear a dog bark, or a bird twitter, or a cock crow, I do not know whether they are thanking me for all I have told of them, or calling me to account."

"Are women really wonderful things? Maybe they are. Yes, women are wonderful things, but when all is said and done, they aren't really “things"."

"Where there's life, death is inevitable. Dying's easy; it's living that's hard. The harder it gets, the stronger the will to live. And the greater the fear of death, the greater the struggle to keep on living."

"As he lat in the relative comfort of a hard-sleeeper cot - relative to a hard-seater, that is - the puffy, balding, beady-eyed, twisted mouth, middle-aged writer Mo Yan wasn't sleepy at all. The overhead lights went out as the train carried him into the night leaving only the dim yellow glare of the floor lights to see by. I know there are many similarities between me and this Mo Yan, but many contradictions as well. I'm a hermit crab, and Mo Yan is the shell I'm occupying. Mo Yan is the rain gear that protects me from storms, a dog hide to ward off the chilled winds, a mask I wear to seduce girls from good families. There are times when I feel that this Mo Yan is a heavy burden, but I can't seem to cast it off, just as a hermit crab cannot rid itself of its shell."

"Bullshit bullshit bullshit... after a string of 'bullshit', he spat out spitefully, Can the cliches! That might work with most people, but not with me. Millions of people all around the world have suffered and been mistreated, but those who become men among men are as rare as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns. It's all a matter of fate, it's in your bones. If you're born with the bones of a beggar, that's what you'll spend you life as."

"Unique descriptions of scene play a significant role in the success of fiction, and any first-rate novelists knows enough to keep changing the scenes in which his characters carry out action, since that no only conceals the novelist's shortcomings, but also heightens the reader's enthuisiasm in the reading process"

"For a writer, talent is everything. Lots of people make a career out of writing, producing many works and knowing exactly what it takes to become a great writer. But they never break into the big time, because they lack one thing: talent, or a sufficient amount of it."

"Ding Gou’er was born in 1941 and married in 1965. It was garden variety marriage, with husband and wife getting along well enough, and producing one child, a darling little boy. He had a mistress who was sometimes adorable and sometimes downright spooky. Sometimes she was like the sun, at other times he moon. Sometimes she was a seductive feline, at other times a mad dog. The idea of divorcing his wife appealed to him, but not enough to actually go through with it. Staying with his mistress was tempting, but not enough to actually do it. Anytime he took sick, he fantasized the onset of cancer, yet was terrified by the thought of the disease; he loved life dearly, and was tired to death of it. He had trouble being decisive. He often stuck the muzzle of his pistol against his temple, then brought it back down; another frequent site of this game was his chest, specifically the area over his heart. One thing and one thing only pleased him without exception or diminution: investigating and solving criminal cases."

"The relationship between man and liquor embodies virtually all contradictions involved in the process of human existence and development."

"“Am I drunk?" he asked Crewcut. "You're not drunk, Boss," Crewcut replied. "How could a superior individual like you be drunk? People around here who get drunk are the dregs of society, illiterates, uncouth people. Highbrow folks, those of the 'spring snow,' cannot get drunk. You're a highbrow, therefore you cannot be drunk.”"

"A writer should always bravely face life, risking death and mutilation in order to dethrone an emperor."

"A tidal wave of trucks and carts moved slowly, inexorably toward the now open gate, bumping and clanging into each other as they squeezed through. The investigator jumped out of the way, and as he stood there observing the passage of this hideous insect, with its countless twisting, shifting sections, he experienced a strange and powerful rage. The birth of that rage was followed by spasms down and around his anus, where irritated blood vessels began to leap painfully, and he knew he was in for a hemorrhoid attack. This time the investigation would go forward, hemorrhoids or no, just like the old days. That thought took the edge off his rage, lessened it considerably, in fact. There's no avoiding the inevitable. Not mass confusion, not hemorrhoids. Only the sacred key to a riddle is eternal. But what was it this time?"

"Liquor infatuates me until I am in capable of following rules and regulations. Liquor's character is wild and unrestrained; its temperament is to talk without thinking."

"The fundamental principle of literature is to create something out of nothing and to make up stories. My creation has not been altogether fashioned out of nothing, and is not entirely made up."

"Finally, she mused that human existence is as brief as the life of autumn grass, so what was there to fear from taking chances with your life?"

"I sometimes think that there is a link between the decline in humanity and the increase in prosperity and comfort. Property and comfort are what people seek, but the costs to character are often terrifying."

"What we are pursuing is beauty, nothing but beauty. It's not true beauty if we didn't create it. Creating beauty with beauty is not true beauty either; real beauty is achieved by transforming the ugly into the beautiful."

"Over decades that seem but a moment in time, lines of scarlet figures shuttled among the sorghum stalks to weave a vast human tapestry. They killed, they looted, and they defended their country in a valiant, stirring ballet that makes us unfilial descendants who now occupy the land pale by comparison."