Literature Quotes
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The student is infinitely more important than the subject matter.
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The world of literature is so rich and so enriching. The value is inestimable of what reading does for you.
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They didn't teach Nietzsche in the philosophy department at Harvard; philosophy there was strictly analytical stuff and the poetic ramblings of Nietzsche did not belong. And see - you are teaching it in a literature class - so they must have been right.
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Everything we do is escapism, because we'll all be dead and everything we do is completely meaningless. Why brush your teeth? Why not be in the park with the bums passing a short dog? Why pay taxes, why get educated? Of course literature is an escape. You have to fill the hours.
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Literature, of course, is not a contest.
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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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I will say little of the importance of a good education; nor will I stop to prove that the current one is bad. Countless others have done so before me, and I do not like to fill a book with things everybody knows. I will note that for the longest time there has been nothing but a cry against the established practice without anyone taking it upon himself to propose a better one. The literature and the learning of our age tend much more to destruction than to edification.
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I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.
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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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I was always drawn to teachers who made class interesting. In high school, I enjoyed my American and English literature classes because my teachers, Jeanne Dorsey and Dani Barton, created an environment where interaction was important.
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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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Literature has become my life.
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The charms of money are distinctly under-represented in literature. There are no songs or poems extolling its virtues. This seems on the face of it strange. The claims of money to be celebrated in verse might well seem to be no less than those of faithful dogs, beautiful women, or jugs of wine.
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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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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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My mother was a teacher, and when she wanted to show me art and literature and science, she'd take me to museums, parks and free exhibitions.
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I hope someday to see California literature become a part of mainstream American literature, and I hope to be part of that process.
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Bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.
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I think if you're impregnated with good literature, with good culture, you're much more difficult to manipulate, and you're much more aware of the dangers that powers represent.
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It is, of course, traditional in children's literature to get rid of the parents.
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I think that literature quite often emerges from areas where there has been a lack of articulation, like women's writing.
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A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
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That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.
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I ought to at least be able to read literature in French. I went to an enlightened grade school that started us on French in fifth grade, which meant that by the time I graduated high school I had been at it for eight years.
