Literature Quotes
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I was a big reader as a child. My father is a great book lover and a librarian, but he forbid me to read bad literature. I was not allowed to read Nancy Drew or books like that. I often say to him that me becoming a crime author is both a way of pleasing him and annoying him.
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The evolution of technology is, like the evolution of literature, heavily path-dependent. Culture plays a far more important role in the acceptance, adoption, and spread of technology than many of us are willing to acknowledge.
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In the thousands of articles that made up the technical literature of chaos, few were cited more often than 'Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow.' For years, no single object would inspire more illustrations, even motion pictures, than the mysterious curve depicted at the end, the double spiral that became known as the Lorenz attractor.
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For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.
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All over the world, maybe besides literature, there's nothing that touches many people as movies do. People see them everywhere.
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The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as 'religious.'
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It’s one thing if everyone wears the same shoes or drinks the same soda. But the world of literature is the last place in which globalization should mean homogeneity.
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Black children need to see their lives reflected in the books they read. If they don't, they won't feel welcome in the world of literature. The lives of African-Americans are rich and diverse, and the books our children read should reflect that.
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There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature.
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Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.
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Literature, like a gypsy, to be picturesque, should be a little ragged.
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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.
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Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse.
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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.
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I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
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Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.
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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.
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What is literature but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'.
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Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.
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Jesus is a mythical figure in the tradition of pagan mythology and almost nothing in all of ancient literature would lead one to believe otherwise. Anyone wanting to believe Jesus lived and walked as a real live human being must do so despite the evidence, not because of it.
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If we want to be sincere, we must admit that there is a well-nourished love and an ill-nourished love. And the rest is literature.
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Writers throughout the ages have one weapon, which is literature, but they also have their responsibilities as a citizen when literature does not seem to suffice. I mean, they are not mutually exclusive. One continues to write anyway but if you are called out to demonstrate, if people are being killed in the streets, it's hardly the moment to go for your pen and paper, you know, help in one way or the other.
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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.
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The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.
