Literature Quotes
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Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.
David Shields
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Naturally I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy.
Comte de Lautreamont
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A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
Virginia Woolf
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The strong bond of sisterhood was a famous trait in classical art and literature about Amazons. But it was modern people who interpreted that as a sexual preference for women. That started in the 20th century. The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva declared that Amazons were symbolic of lesbianism in antiquity.
Adrienne Mayor
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Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
William Butler Yeats
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The literature of the immediate future will inevitably turn away from painting, whether respectably realistic or modern, and from daily life, whether old or the very latest and revolutionary, and turn to artistically realized philosophy.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Once upon a time, an editor could try out one or two wacky books, knowing full well that their list would counterbalance any risk with a stable of best-sellers and safe bets. Nowadays, every book must earn its own bread. With low overheads and an often episodic operating status, the small independent press is nicely placed to snap up the most innovative literature going at the moment. To take the risks. Meaning that small presses are no longer just outfits set up to publish your or your friends' work. They have something genuinely important to offer.
Andrew Latimer
Camel
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Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish.
Rita Mae Brown
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I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.
Flannery O'Connor
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In European and American society, many pundits started to lament the death of literature; looking at youth who were getting more and more attracted to sitcoms - hard, adventure films and said, our children are no longer reading, or else they're reading cartoons.
Wole Soyinka
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It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn’t wait to leave.
Anatole Broyard
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The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.
Hermann Hesse
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I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.
Jonathan Frakes
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From arts, to literature, to science, to the founding of Christian institutions, all of that has its roots in a biblical worldview, but when you fail to recognize that it's the systemic reality of the greatest civilization in the history of humanity, you can become apathetic about what you actually now have. We have something that generations of people did not have.
Hank Hanegraaff
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When I was writing stories about Chinese American characters in my fiction classes, I'd get comments like, 'You should consider writing more universal stories.' But anything can happen to a Chinese American girl - just as much of the canon of English literature involves white men or women.
Jenny Zhang
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The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.
Mark Twain
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The [Nobel] award [of Bob Dylan] is no affront to literature; it is an insult to pop music. It is a condescending ruffle of pop's hair while handing it a lollipop. An act of beaming condescension whose transparent message is: "This one guy, and just this one guy, he's so good, he transcends his trivial idiom and elevates himself into our significant one."
David Bennun
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When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.
Derek Walcott
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The book that made me decide to go into Russian literature was 'Anna Karenina,' which I first read in high school. The thing that appealed to me and constituted its Russianness for me was that it was simultaneously incredibly funny and sad.
Elif Batuman
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When I first began writing, and I told people what I wrote, I'd get a blank stare and sometimes a 'Huh?' They weren't sure what young adult literature was. Now everyone knows.
Mary E. Pearson
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When I wrote about Mary Wollstonecraft, I found that here she was, in the late 18th century, going to work for the 'Analytical Review.' What was the 'Analytical Review?' It was a magazine that dealt with politics and literature.
Claire Tomalin
