Literature Quotes
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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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In all highly civilised communities Pretence is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature.
James Payn
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I want to go to college for literature. I want to be a writer. I mean, I love what I do, but its not all I want to do-be a professional liar for the rest of my life.
Kristen Stewart
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Good literature always ends up showing those who read it... the inevitable limitation of all power to fulfill human aspirations and desires.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.
William Kennedy
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I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.
Chris Abani
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I am not ashamed to admit that I belong to those who fantasize that literature is capable of bringing new horizons and new perspectives - philosophical, religious, aesthetical and even social. In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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Few are there that will leave the secure seclusion of the scholar's life, the peaceful walks of literature and learning, to stand out a target for the criticism of unkind and hostile minds.
Felix Adler
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The great subversive works of children's literature suggest that there are other views of human life besides those of the shopping mall and the corporation. They mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, noncommercial view of the world in its simplest and purest form. They appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all of us, renew our instinctive energy, and act as a force for change. This is why such literature is worthy of our attention and will endure long after more conventional tales have been forgotten.
Alison Lurie
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I don't see why escapist literature should not also be a work of art.
P. D. James
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Though [Abraham Lincoln] never would travel to Europe, he went with Shakespeare's kings to Merry England; he went with Lord Byron poetry to Spain and Portugal. Literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
