Literature Quotes
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The secret of literature, which conventional people don't guess, is that writers are forever looking for the surprising revelation - not for reinforcement of collective wisdom.
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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.
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I hesitated before buying a Kindle. I wasn't worried that the digital reader would ruin literature as we know it. Rather, my concern centered on using an electronic device in the bathtub.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Jean Toomer is a phantom of the Harlem Renaissance. Pick up any general study of the literature written by Afro-Americans, and there is the name of Jean Toomer. In biographies and memoirs of Harlem Renaissance figures, his name is invoked as if he had been one of the sights along Lenox Avenue.
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The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word 'renowned'... I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative... Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International.
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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.
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Literature is man's exploration of man by artificial light, which is better than natural light because we can direct it where we want.
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Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
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Shouldn't the cascades of extinction and rapid planetary warming register in our literature?
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I wanted to write plays. I was at Yale graduate school at the time for English literature, not for acting... I liked the idea of collaboration, and I thought if I'm gonna write plays, I should learn something about speaking the lines that I might try to write.
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I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: The most conscientous student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.
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There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.
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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.
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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.
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The excellence of this important contribution to genre literature CANNOT be overstated A masterwork.
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What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?
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If we think about folk forms, they belong to disenfranchised people, people who have not been allowed access to the poetry of literature or the leisure time that comes with the pursuit of poetry. Instead, this is ceremony. This is a highly charged way to create a sacred space that isn't necessarily about God, but is about human experience at its most profound levels - whether that's love or grief, separation, or homeland. All are altered states.
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There is much made in the psychological literature of the effects of divorce on children, particularly as it comes to their own marriages, lo those many years later. We have always wondered why there is not more research done on the children of happy marriages. Our parents' love is not some grand passion, there are no swoons of lust, no ball gowns and tuxedos, but here is the truth: they have not spent a night apart since the day they married.How can we ever hope to find a love to live up to that?
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Sanity - that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
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Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land; Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand.
