Literature Quotes
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Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.
Virginia Woolf
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I always loved to read, and I wanted to be part of the project of literature. My physical longevity is due to luck, and my literary longevity is due to my physical longevity.
Edith Pearlman
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The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness. But Jean Rhys, in her biography, is read as borderline; Anaïs Nin is borderline; Djuna is borderline; etc. etc. Borderline personality disorder being an overwhelmingly gendered diagnosis. I write in Heroines: “The charges of borderline personality disorder are the same charges against girls writing literature, I realize - too emotional, too impulsive, no boundaries."
Kate Zambreno
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Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt. It confirms itself as it disparages itself. It seeks itself: this is more than it has a right to do, because literature may be one of those things which deserve to be found but not to be sought.
Maurice Blanchot
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The road that led me to literature was very different from the one followed by my fellow writers in Poland.
Marek Hlasko
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A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured.
Henry David Thoreau
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My own duty as a teacher...is not so much to interpret Beethoven, Wagner, or other masters of the past, but to give what encouragement I can to the young musicians of America. I...hope that just as this nation has already surpassed so many others in marvelous inventions and feats of engineering and commerce, and has made an honorable place for itself in literature in one short century, so it must assert itself on the...art of music...To bring about this result, we must trust the very youthful enthusiasm and patriotism of this country.
Antonin Dvorak
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Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.
Damon Galgut
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Joseph Warren, like a lot of revolutionary leaders, was into Enlightenment literature.
Nathaniel Philbrick
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Literature for me isn't a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy.
Antonio Tabucchi
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How any person decides to emphasize strengths and mitigate weaknesses is something people have to figure out for themselves. I'm wary of the self-help literature that suggests there are certain rules. I'm very happy for people to look at my story and say it's possible to achieve many things.
Daniel Tammet
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The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.
Samuel Butler
