Literature Quotes
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If you focus on literature through only one small element of it, like the more scientific element of linguistics, then where is the joy that brought us literature in the first place, which is to have a story?
T. C. Boyle
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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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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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If you say city to people, people have no problem thinking of the city as rife with problematic, screwed-up people, but if you say suburbs - and I'm not the first person to say this, it's been said over and over again in literature - there's a sense of normalcy.
Eric Bogosian
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Literature is idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines in only twenty-six symbols, ten arabic numbers, and about eight punctuation marks.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I actually studied literature at university, so I'm much more of an arts-based person, but I remember I actually did enjoy physics because you got to do weird experiments. I remember we did this thing with static where we all had to put our hands on this static ball to see that your hair would all stand on end.
Felicity Jones
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In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.
Amy Lowell
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If literature (realistic) did really resemble life, it would be interminable, dreary, commonplace eating and dressing, buttoning, with here and there a patch of vividness. Life is composed of exquisite moments and the rest is shadows of them.
T. E. Hulme
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Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
David Brin
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Hawkesworth said of Johnson, 'You have a memory that would convict any author of plagiarism in any court of literature in the world.'
Samuel Johnson
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When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master's program and studied American literature.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I think cinema is linked to literature by a lot of social ways. Our brains are full of literature - my brain is.
Claire Denis
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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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Today there is a division between those who write about literature and those who create it. I, obviously, don't think that should be there.
Alistair MacLeod
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I can always tell when I'm about to start writing. I go through cycles in reading. When I'm beginning to start to write something, I start reading what I think of as good literature. I read things with wonderful language.
Patricia MacLachlan
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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