Literature Quotes
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Virginia Woolf's literature really transformed my own ideas about how to formally represent the passage of time and how time affects us. Specifically, the benchmarks are 'Mrs. Dalloway,' 'To the Lighthouse' and 'Orlando,' all of which have time as a central conceit.
David Lowery
Camper Van Beethoven
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I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
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If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down.
Walter Kirn
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It has been said that no great work in literature or in science was ever wrought by a man who did not love solitude. We may lay it down as an elemental principle of religion, that no large growth in holiness was ever gained by one who did not take time to be often long alone with God.
Austin Phelps
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My intention throughout has been to write, to create literature, and to be able to look people in the eye after I'd done it - the people I'd written about.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
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The most enduring stories in literature generally have some kind of crime at their center, whether it's the bloody butchery of 'Hamlet,' the lecherous misanthropes of Dickens or the lone gunman from 'The Great Gatsby.'
Karin Slaughter
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All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
Ernest Hemingway
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I am interested in things happening around me, and I need to understand what's going on in other artistic sectors like music and literature.
Tadao Ando
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Honestly, I feel you are poisoned if you read too much of the scientific literature because it makes you start thinking like other people. You're better off having a vague sense of what's going on and making your own way.
Eric Betzig
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Languages, literature, art, music, history: are all self-evident helps - and even mathematics and sciences, by training memory and demanding the analytical approach, are helpful by indirection.
Irene Dunne
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Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The adolescent protagonist is one of the hallmarks of American literature.
Tayari Jones
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A script is not a piece of literature it's a process.
Abel Ferrara
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The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.
Salman Rushdie
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In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February.
Natasha Trethewey
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For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.
A. Bartlett Giamatti
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I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's incomplete.
Taiye Selasi
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As with all great works of literature, 'Of Mice and Men' moves with the inexorability of a huge river, and it pours itself, exhausts itself, in the sea of our unconscious. Having read it, we carry the book inside us forever.
Jay Parini
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When I'm feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it's going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn't historically been represented in literature.
Jacqueline Woodson
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My models were oral, were storytellers. Like my grandmothers and my aunts. It's true, a lot of people in my life were not literate in a formal sense, but they were storytellers. So I had this experience of just watching somebody spin a tale off the top of her head. I loved that.
Edwidge Danticat
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The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.
Chinua Achebe