Literature Quotes
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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.
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The most difficult achievement is the capacity to see oneself, to name oneself, to imagine oneself. If in daily life we use ideologies, common sense, religion, even literature itself to disguise our experiences and make them presentable, in fiction it’s possible to sweep away all the veils—in fact, perhaps, it’s a duty.
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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.
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Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.
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It goes without saying that before its culture and literature can continue to evolve, Latvia first must endure the political comedy of creating a stable, functioning and unthreatened democracy.
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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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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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More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
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When I was a worker I busied myself with socialist or, if you like, marxist literature.
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Willmott, the English essayist, says poetry is the natural religion of literature.
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What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?
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My idea of teaching literature is just to read great passages aloud or to look at it the way a writer does, which is what I try to do. Which is to say, 'How does this writer do this? How did he order his scenes? Do you notice any pattern to his sentences?'
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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 .
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All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents.
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Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.
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I have the same confidence in the ability of our people to reject noxious literature as I have in their capacity to sort out the true from the false in theology, economics, or any other field.
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People who are strangers to liquor are incapable of talking about literature.
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Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.
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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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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.
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People who have no hold over their process of thinking are likely to be ruined by liberty of thought. If thought is immature, liberty of thought becomes a method of converting men into animals.
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Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.
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The same is true of ranking him thus against any work of literature. [Bob Dylan] has been made, through no fault of his own, the object of odious tokenism.
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I think of myself as a Russophile. I speak the language and studied the nation's literature and history in college.
