Literature Quotes
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The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
H. L. Mencken
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A Christian philosophy of literature begins with the same agenda of issues that any philosophy of literature addresses. Its distinctive feature is that it relates these issues to the Christian faith.
Leland Ryken
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I studied psychology in school, and the best psychology is in literature. It's so much easier to understand a character than a theory. You can recognize yourself—or other people—in a different way.
Natalie Portman
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This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
Virginia Woolf
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When I come to England, I don't claim England; I don't own it. I feel a great kinship because of the literature and the landscape. I have great affection for Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin, but there's still this distance: looking on at what I'm admiring, separate from what I am. And that's OK.
Derek Walcott
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A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.
Northrop Frye
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The author Goya is convinced that it is as proper for painting to criticize human error and vice as for poetry and prose to do so, although criticism is usually taken to be exclusively the business of literature.
Francisco Goya
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Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological', while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature... He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.
Edwin Muir
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One of the historical vulnerabilities of literature, as a subject for study, is that it has never seemed difficult enough. This may come as news to the buckled figure of the book reviewer, but it's true. Hence the various attempts to elevate it, complicate it, systematize it. Interacting with literature is easy.
Martin Amis
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Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
H. L. Mencken
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Tower Records was a place to meet your friends, your co-workers or a place to meet new friends who shared a common love of music, literature and all things cultural.
Colin Hanks
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Poetry is the greatest literature, and pleasure in poetry is the greatest of literary pleasures. It is also the least easy to attain and there are some people who never do attain it.
Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon
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I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general.
Ken Liu
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In the field of aesthetic theory, humans are pattern-seeking creatures. That can be seen in terms of musical structures, patternmaking, even in terms of storytelling and literature.
Kehinde Wiley
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To be honest, I don't listen to much music! I've been so engrossed in it my whole life that when I drive around in my car, I'll listen to college lectures on philosophy and literature and world history, things like that, to kind of catch up on the college experience I missed.
Butch Trucks
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I feel that I have an impractical and deleterious snobbery about the relation of literature to the market. I thought, 'I've become the kind of crap you buy at airports!' It was exciting, but it was not a fantasy I'd ever had.
Claire Messud
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The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
Sarah Orne Jewett
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The great Cham of literature. (Samuel Johnson)
Tobias Smollett
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Beethoven for listening; Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It's as wide as literature; in fact, it is probably wider.
William Golding
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By the age of nine I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them.
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont
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They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.
William Golding
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To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
Lawrence Clark Powell
