Literature Quotes
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Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.
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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.
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One of the interesting things about the 'Decameron' itself was it was written in the Florentine dialect as opposed to the Latin vernacular - and that was mainly to have it be a piece of literature for the people as supposed to some kind of highfalutin' canon.
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Muhammadan law in its relation to women, is a pattern to European law. Look back to the history of Islam, and you will find that women have often taken leading places - on the throne, in the battle-field, in politics, in literature, poetry, etc.
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Augustine's description of Ambrose's silent reading (including the remark that he never read aloud) is the first definite instance recorded in Western literature.
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Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.
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I may remind you that history is not a branch of literature. The facts of history, like the facts of geology or astronomy, can supply material for literary art; for manifest reasons they lend themselves to artistic representation far more readily than those of the natural sciences; but to clothe the story of human society in a literary dress is no more the part of a historian as a historian, than it is the part of an astronomer as an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars.
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I left school at 16 but I wish I'd gone to university - I think I would have studied English literature. I had a knack for that. But I don't think you have the kind of wisdom at 16 to make that decision.
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I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.
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My mother has always been an Anglophile and taught my sister and me to love British history and literature.
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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.
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If I might control the literature of the household, I would guarantee the well-being of Church and State.
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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.
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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
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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.
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I'm sorry to say that far worse things have happened and the literature of the Holocaust is a witness to the capacity of the novel as a form.
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Actors are the jockeys of literature. Others supply the horses, the plays, and we simply make them run.
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My first true lesson in writing came from Mr. Bowden when I was 16. At my high school, he was the teacher known to be the very best at literature and writing.
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The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
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Vengeance is a strange human motivation --- it can drive a man to do things which he neither would nor could achieve without it ... and because of that it lies behind some of the greatest sagas of human literature!
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Literature should be more revolutionary than revolutions themselves; writers must find the means to continue to be critical of the negative elements in the sociopolitical reality.
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I feel like elements of race and identity and ethnicity are sort of missing in all of literature, not just in women's literature.
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I don't pick subjects as much as they pick me.
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I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.
