Literature Quotes
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Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.
Ernest Hemingway
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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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So much of young adult literature has turned dark, almost pathological. It's almost as if there is a race to see who can be the most dysfunctional.
Richard Paul Evans
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I can't believe that people really prefer to go to the concert hall under intellectually trying, socially trying, physically trying conditions, unable to repeat something they have missed, when they can sit at home under the most comfortable and stimulating circumstances and hear it as they want to hear it. I can't imagine what would happen to literature today if one were obliged to congregate in an unpleasant hall and read novels projected on a screen.
Milton Babbitt
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As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.
Ezra Pound
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There are people whom even children’s literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalter and in the Wisdom of Solomon.
Anton Chekhov
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I am actuated by an ambition which I believe to be an honourable one the ambition of serving the great cause of truth, while endeavouring to forward the literature of the country.
Edgar Allan Poe
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There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.
Ernest Hemingway
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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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Every author that creates is a liar;literature is a lie,but from that lie, a recreation of reality is born. Therefore, recreating reality is one of the fundaments of creation.
Juan Rulfo
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Since I have fought against these Jewish-Soviet ideas in Germany, since I have conquered and stamped out this peril, I fancy that I possess a better comprehension of its character than do these men who have only to deal with it in the field of literature.
Adolf Hitler
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If you covet fame, if you covet all the superficial accolades, you're gonna be miserable 'cause you're never going to get enough praise. If you covet contributing something substantive to movies, music, literature, then you won't be unhappy.
Ethan Hawke
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In my first publication I might have claimed that I had come to the conclusion, as a result of serious study of the literature and deep thought, that valuable antibacterial substances were made by moulds and that I set out to investigate the problem. That would have been untrue and I preferred to tell the truth that penicillin started as a chance observation. My only merit is that I did not neglect the observation and that I pursued the subject as a bacteriologist. My publication in 1929 was the starting-point of the work of others who developed penicillin especially in the chemical field.
Alexander Acosta
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I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia . See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.
William Saroyan
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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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I hope to be remembered for writing books about social justice that also have enough aesthetic value to endure as works of literature.
Jonathan Kozol
