Literature Quotes
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Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.
Northrop Frye
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At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
John Keats
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I think it is a mistake to identify a movie according to its language, as if movies were literature.
Jean-Jacques Annaud
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What's been lost is allowing cinema to be artful, playful, to have ambiguity, to have form, to be contemplative, to wish to be art. This slightly timeless approach to reality, like Chekhov in literature, where you look at all humanity and try to find what's transcendent.
Pawel Pawlikowski
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Seeds and nuts are indispensable for cardiovascular health. The protective properties of nuts against coronary heart disease were first recognized in the early 1990s, and a strong body of literature has followed, confirming these original findings.
Joel Fuhrman
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My mother has always been an Anglophile and taught my sister and me to love British history and literature.
Emily Giffin
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I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.
Manuel Puig
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Early Islam was a time of great creativity. Scholars excelled in sciences and literature. Our religion should not be a shield behind which we hide from the world but a driving force that inspires us to innovate and contribute to our surroundings. This is the true spirit of Islam.
Basmah bint Saud
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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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I am persuaded that without knowledge of literature pure theology cannot at all endure. . . . When letters have declined and lain prostrate, theology, too, has wretchedly fallen and lain prostrate. . . . It is my desire that there shall be as many poets and rhetoricians as possible, because I see that by these studies as by no other means, people are wonderfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truth and for handling it skillfully and happily.
Martin Luther
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Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.
Oscar Wilde
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Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.
T. S. Eliot
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Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
Paul Valery
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The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.
Flannery O'Connor
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The peasant boy, who followed the coloured track of the rainbow, hoping to find the blue and charmed flower which springs where the arch touches earth, is wiser far than one who gives youth, genius, and time to literature.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
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Hopefully, reading and being around great literature inspires me to write songs, but I'm not sure about that.
Mat Kearney
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I'm not writing great literature. I'm writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.
Kathy Reichs
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In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations.
Anne Bogart
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When I look back at what I've written and try to explain it, it doesn't help, but it helps to be in a process of writing. It's the same thing with reading - you lose yourself when you read as well. When I was younger I used literature that way, it was just escapism, a tool to run away from things.
Karl Ove Knausgard
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Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature.
Ravi Shankar