Literature Quotes
-
One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer.
-
The most appealing part is the feeling of learning something true - the pleasure of a truth. For me, that's mostly found in philosophical literature at the moment.
-
A doctor is not criticized for describing the manifestations and symptoms of an illness, even though the symptoms may be disgusting. I feel that a writer has the right to the same freedom In fact, I think that the time has come for the line between literature and science, a purely arbitrary line, to be erased.
-
It seems to me to make as much sense to talk about literature as a large-scale human phenomenon without bringing in evolution as it does to engage in cosmology while you're thinking the universe is still geocentric.
-
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?'
-
When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature.
-
Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.
-
I made a compact with myself that in my person literature should stand by itself, of itself, and for itself.
-
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?
-
Cham is the only thing to screw one up when one is down a peg.
-
Although there is a very large literature, still growing almost daily, on the Chinese calendar, its interest is, we suggest, much more archaeological and historical than scientific.
-
There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.
-
We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.
-
You can tell a man's taste in literature by his judgment in knowing what not to read.
-
American literature was enriched with Men Who Loved Allison.... Of the actual and eventual worth of this romance I cannot pretend to be an unprejudiced judge. The tale seems to me one of those many books which have profited, very dubiously indeed, by having obtained, in one way of another, the repute of being indecent.
-
Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large.
-
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.
-
When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings - let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.
-
Wherever we direct our attention to Hindu literature the notion of infinity presents itself.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A great speech is literature.
-
Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.
-
Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.
