Literature Quotes
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I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.
Per Petterson
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If we turn to early Irish literature, as we naturally may, to see what sort of people the Irish were in the infancy of the race, we find ourselves wandering in delighted bewilderment through a darkness shot with lightning and purple flame.
Sean O'Faolain
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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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The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other peoples eyes. All good books do this.
Sandra Cisneros
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Beethoven for listening; Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It's as wide as literature; in fact, it is probably wider.
William Golding
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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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I was in school for literature, and read so many 19th century and early 20th century novels that it was hard to break out of that and read an average Jeanette Winterson book or something.
Colin Meloy
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Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.
Cesare Pavese
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In order to have a literature, a nation must live, not merely on the practical, but on the moral and spiritual plane as well, contributing through its national life to the development of some side of the universal spirit of man.
Vissarion Belinsky
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Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.
Thomas Bulfinch
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Eighteen centuries have passed since the Bible was finished. They have been centuries of great changes. In their course the world has been wrought over into newness at almost every point. But, to-day, the text of the Scriptures, after copyings almost innumerable and after having been tossed about through ages of ignorance and tumult, is found by exhaustive criticism to be unaltered in every important particular — there being not a single doctrine, nor duty, nor fact of any grade, that is brought into question by variations of readings — a fact that stands alone in the history of such ancient literature.
Enoch Fitch Burr
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There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.
Ben Lerner
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No work of literature is the product of only one or two conscious ideas. A story is mysteriously dense of meaning.
Carol Bly
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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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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.
Geoffrey K. Pullum
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The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
Milton Friedman
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I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.
Honore de Balzac
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The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
Sarah Orne Jewett
