Literature Quotes
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In literature, the ghost is almost always a metaphor for the weight of the past. I don't believe in them in the traditional sense.
Tabitha King
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Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.
Nathaniel Philbrick
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Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
Nadine Gordimer
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I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express that.
J. M. G. Le Clezio
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Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
Carlos Fuentes
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I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.
Anthony Marra
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Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers.
Walter Kirn
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When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson.
Marilynne Robinson
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Asian literature is evolving with the people. It's always a reflection on what's happening to the culture at large.
Kevin Kwan
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I'm a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I've had great difficulty getting my work published in China; very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given.
Salman Rushdie
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A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.
Karen Thompson Walker
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The primary thing writing and basketball share is the sense that each time you go out, each time you play or begin a piece, it's a new day. You can score 40 points one game, but the next game, those points don't count. You can win the Nobel Literature Prize, but that doesn't make the next sentence of the next book appear.
John Edgar Wideman
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This is the harsh truth about us: not only do Filipinos ignore books, literature - we do not understand how important the arts are - not just to those of us who work at it, but to the nation as a whole.
F. Sionil Jose
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Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable.
M. H. Abrams
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Literature - Eastern and Western - abounds with stories, myths, legends about the search for youth, for eternal life.
F. Sionil Jose
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Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C. S. Lewis
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I originally went to school for writing, for non-fiction. I'm specifically a poetry major within literature, but I don't know.
Paloma Elsesser
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The crown of literature is poetry.
W. Somerset Maugham
