Literature Quotes
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Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
Nadine Gordimer
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The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind.
Edwin Muir
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I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have from reading novels. The understatements in the tenor saxophone of Lester Young, the crystal, haunting, forever searching sounds of John Coltrane, and the softness and violence of Count Basie's big band - all have fired my imagination as much as anything in literature.
Ernest Gaines
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What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism .
Terry Eagleton
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Literature is air, and I'm suffocating in mediocrity.
Armand Assante
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The writings of women are always cold and pretty like themselves. There is as much wit as you may desire, but never any soul.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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There is nothing sacred or untouchable except the freedom to think. Without criticism, that is to say, without rigor and experimentation, there is no science, without criticism there is no art or literature. I would also say that without criticism there is no healthy society.
Octavio Paz
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What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.
Simone de Beauvoir
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The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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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Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.
Phillips Brooks
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Science is a limited way of knowing, looking at just the natural world and natural causes. There are a lot of ways human beings understand the universe - through literature, theology, aesthetics, art or music.
Eugenie Scott
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England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.
E. M. Forster
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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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No writing is good enough until you, as an author, make a small contribution, the size of a drop, into the ocean of the world’s literature.
Nuruddin Farah
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Willmott, the English essayist, says poetry is the natural religion of literature.
William R. Alger
