speaking topics / literature

Literature speaking topics

118 real topics. Every one is sourced and deep enough to talk about for 10-15 minutes. Click one to see its detail page, or practice in the app.

• Borges imagines the universe as an infinite library containing every possible book. If everything has already been written, is meaning lost in the abundance of information, or in our inability to find it?
• I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
• Language is wine upon the lips.
• Frankenstein was written while Mary Shelley grieved the loss of her baby, and the grief drips off the pages. How much should an author's life shape how we read their work?
• You are a better writer than AI, the argument that flawed human writing carries something no language model can produce.
• Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me.
• Surveys keep showing men read far less fiction than women. Does it matter what kind of stories men consume, and what would change if they read more novels?
• A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
• Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue.
• Shakespeare's Hamlet has the power to take revenge yet endlessly delays, thinks, weighs. Does overthinking kill action; is awareness sometimes a form of paralysis?
• Nietzsche's eternal recurrence: if you were condemned to live your exact life, with all its pain, over and over for eternity, could you say yes to it? Is that a curse or a test?
• In Greek myth, Tantalus reaches forever for the fruit above him and the water at his feet, and both pull away every time. Why is unreachable desire the most refined form of torture?
• All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog.
• Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
• There is no sin except stupidity.
• Orwell's 'doublethink': holding two contradictory beliefs at once and accepting both as true. Can a language make thought impossible by destroying its words?
• 'Othering': a society defines itself by casting someone out as 'not us, them.' Do we build our identity out of what we are, or out of what we are not?
• Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.
• The difference between realism and naturalism: Balzac's social observation versus Zola's deterministic, scientific approach.
• Book clubs are overwhelmingly female and men read far less fiction. Why, and does it matter?
• The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
• As long as there are slaughterhouses there will always be battlefields.
• To love is to tire of being alone.
• If it's impossible for you to live alone, you were born a slave.
• There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness, and truth.
• Melville's scrivener Bartleby answers every request with 'I would prefer not to,' neither accepting nor refusing. Why is this passive resistance, offered without any reason, so unsettling?
• In stream of consciousness writing, the author abandons punctuation and logic to capture the mind's raw flow. Molly Bloom's unpunctuated inner monologue: does thought really run in sentences, or is it a mess?
• If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
• Happiness means being close to the one you love, that's all.
• Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.
• To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
• Can a book make you a morally better person?
• Life itself is a quotation.
• Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
• A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.
• Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.
• In Ionesco's play, everyone in town turns into a rhinoceros one by one, until staying human becomes a strange, lonely act of stubbornness. When mass madness becomes the norm, does resistance look like insanity?
• There will be full freedom when it will be just the same to live or not to live.
• To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
• The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible.
• To understand, I destroyed myself.
• Each of us has heaven and hell in him.
• And if happiness can keep a man alive who's marked down for death, then I'll stay alive.
• To say that you can love one person all your life is like saying that one candle will continue burning as long as you live.
• Kafka's hero wakes up one morning as a giant insect, yet nobody asks why; the real worry is being late for work. Is the Kafkaesque horror hidden in how the extraordinary gets treated as ordinary?
• Literature is a picture, or rather in a certain sense both a picture and a mirror.
• In Dante's hell, the punishment mirrors the sin exactly: the lustful are whirled forever in a storm. Is justice the act of turning a crime's own shape into its punishment (contrapasso)?
• I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness, a real thorough-going illness.
• I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.
• If you feel pain, you're alive. If you feel other people's pain, you're human.
• There are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.
• Proust's narrator dips a madeleine in his tea and the taste brings his whole childhood flooding back. Why does a smell or a taste hurl us into the past far more powerfully than deliberate remembering?
• Book bans in schools are surging. Who should decide what children are allowed to read?
• Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
• It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.
• It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
• I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.
• Do audiobooks count as reading? Defend your answer, and consider who the question quietly excludes.
• In Camus's The Stranger, Meursault is judged less for the murder than for not crying at his mother's funeral. Does society punish people for what they do, or for how they fail to feel?
• It is not beauty that endears, it's love that makes us see beauty.
• Barthes declares 'the death of the author': a text's meaning is born not in the writer's intention but in the reader's reading. Who truly creates a work, the one who writes it or the one who reads it?
• Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
• Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.
• Freedom is the possibility of isolation.
• In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it.
• In Woolf's To the Lighthouse, time sometimes stretches across pages during a single lunch, and sometimes ten years pass inside a parenthesis. Why is the time we live so out of step with clock time?
• The Russian formalists' idea of 'defamiliarization' (ostranenie): art makes the ordinary strange so we see it as if for the first time. Does habit really kill seeing?
• Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
• Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle.
• I am the size of what I see and not the size of my height.
• Can a single book genuinely change the way you think about almost everything?
• Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss.
• Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.
• Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.
• Goethe's Faust sells his soul to the devil for boundless knowledge and experience. Does the search for meaning lie in never being satisfied, so that the moment you say 'linger a while, you are so beautiful' you are lost?
• All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
• Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
• What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
• Dostoevsky's Underground Man acts against his own obvious interest just to prove he is free. Do people sometimes hurt themselves simply to show that they can choose?
• For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, to own these pains and wounds, and to make them a conscious part of our spirits and our writing.
• Sisyphus rolls his boulder to the top forever, and every time it rolls back down. Camus says we must imagine Sisyphus happy: how is happiness possible in meaningless repetition, or is that just a consoling lie?
• In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
• In García Márquez's Macondo, the dead talk with the living, rain falls for four years, and no one is surprised. Does magical realism make reality more real by making the miraculous ordinary?
• Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich only asks on his deathbed, what if my whole life was lived wrong? Why do people postpone authenticity to the very end while believing they are living correctly?
• Sylvia Plath's heroine imagines a fig tree where every fig is a possible life, and because she cannot choose one, they all rot and fall. Is endless possibility freedom, or paralysis?
• A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.
• Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
• Music is the shorthand of emotion.
• A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
• 'Catharsis': watching tragedy, we feel pain and fear yet come away strangely cleansed. Why does watching someone else's catastrophe relieve us, even heal us?
• In ancient tragedy, 'hamartia' is the fatal flaw or error that drives the hero to ruin. Oedipus fulfills his fate precisely by trying to escape it: why do prophecies fulfill themselves?
• Everything wearies me, even those things that don't.
• Professors report students arriving at university unable to read a full book. What happens to a generation that loses deep reading?
• When we are unhappy we feel the unhappiness of others more; feeling is not destroyed but concentrated.
• In Wilde's novel, Dorian stays young while his portrait grows ugly and old in his place. If our faces hid our sins, would morality shrink to the question of not getting caught?
• The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
• I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me.
• Sartre says 'Hell is other people': three characters locked forever in each other's gaze. Is our identity really trapped in how others see us?
• A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.
• Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
• What do we actually mean by 'Kafkaesque': a world where an invisible, unreachable bureaucracy accuses you but never tells you what your crime is. Why does that description still feel so familiar today?
• Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
• In Beckett's play, two men wait forever for someone who will never come; nothing happens, no one arrives. Can waiting itself become a way of life; is hope a trap?
• Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor tells Christ that people cannot bear freedom, so the Church took it from them to make them happy. Do humans really want security more than freedom?
• To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
• Tea is the only simple pleasure left to us.
• Homer's Odysseus wants to hear the Sirens' deadly song, so he has himself tied to the mast: he surrenders to the desire and guards against it at the same time. Is willpower the art of taking precautions against your future self?
• I have put my genius into my life; I have put only my talent into my works.
• In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection in the water and dies because he cannot tear himself away. Is self-admiration a kind of blindness; are loving yourself and seeing yourself the same thing?
• If the heart could think it would stop beating.
• The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.
• Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time.
• Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
• We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
• In Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, the clash between Jean Valjean's moral transformation and Inspector Javert's unbending idea of justice.
• Cervantes's Don Quixote charges at windmills he takes for giants; is he mad, or does he see the world not as it is but as it ought to be? Is idealism a form of madness?
• The literary classics forced on students at school may be destroying their desire to read for pleasure.
• A self-described novelist boasted that with AI she can produce a new book in 45 minutes. What is a book worth when anyone can generate one?