Literature Quotes
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There are a handful of people whom money won't spoil, and we all count ourselves among them.
Mignon McLaughlin
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There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be pure--pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.
Virginia Woolf
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In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.
Charles Baudelaire
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Slowly but surely I have been soaking Rilke up these last few months: the man, his work and his life. And that is probably the only right way with literature, with study, with people or with anything else: to let it all soak in, to let it all mature slowly inside you until it has become a part of yourself. That, too, is a growing process. Everything is a growing process. And in between, emotions and sensations that strike you like lightning. But still the most important thing is the organic process of growing.
Etty Hillesum
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I am not attempting here a full appreciation of Colonel Roosevelt. He will be known for all time as one of the great men of America. I am only giving you this personal recollection as a little contribution to his memory, as one that I can make from personal knowledge and which is now known only to myself. His conversation about birds was made interesting by quotations from poets. He talked also about politics, and in the whole of his conversation about them there was nothing but the motive of public spirit and patriotism. I saw enough of him to know that to be with him was to be stimulated in the best sense of the word for the work of life. Perhaps it is not yet realised how great he was in the matter of knowledge as well as in action. Everybody knows that he was a great man of action in the fullest sense of the word. The Press has always proclaimed that. It is less often that a tribute is paid to him as a man of knowledge as well as a man of action. Two of your greatest experts in natural history told me the other day that Colonel Roosevelt could, in that department of knowledge, hold his own with experts. His knowledge of literature was also very great, and it was knowledge of the best. It is seldom that you find so great a man of action who was also a man of such wide and accurate knowledge. I happened to be impressed by his knowledge of natural history and literature and to have had first-hand evidence of both, but I gather from others that there were other fields of knowledge in which he was also remarkable.
Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon
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There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.
Ada Leverson
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I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.
Lois Lowry
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Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.
Mignon McLaughlin
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My evolution into becoming a photojournalist started with falling in love with literature when I was a teenager, falling in love with novels and imagining a life of being a storyteller.
Ed Kashi
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The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass
Virginia Woolf
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The natural sciences are sometimes said to have no concern with values, nor to seek morality and goodness, and therefore belong to an inferior order of things. Counter-claims are made that they are the only living and dynamic studies... Both contentions are wrong. Language, Literature and Philosophy express, reflect and contemplate the world. But it is a world in which men will never be content to stay at rest, and so these disciplines cannot be cut off from the great searching into the nature of things without being deprived of life-blood.
Cyril Norman Hinshelwood
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Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious.
Paul Auster
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We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
William James
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The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it's literature.
Whitley Strieber
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Art and literature need extreme sociality to a degree that even dolphins don't have. We are the only large mammalian species that has such intense sociality. There are some small mammals that have become eusocial - the mole rats - but that's a different thing. Humans are able to understand one another at very high levels, to cooperate in very large groups. Humans depend on one another in ways that are an absolute precondition to sharing the kinds of information that makes narrative possible.
Brian Boyd