Literature Quotes
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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.
Eugenie Scott
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I'm not sure many writers are trying to reconcile all the things that are separated in our culture - body and mind, urban and pastoral, lyricism and hardboiled, men and women, joy and grief. I tried to do quite a lot, but I wanted to create a serious work of literature.
Nicola Griffith
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People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy.
Gary Saul Morson
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I have respect for literature. If he found the words, if she found the words - this is a book!
Agnes Varda
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Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Some one, I think it was Isaac Disraeli, said that he who did not make himself acquainted with the best thoughts of the greatest writers would one day be mortified to observe that his best thoughts are their indifferent ones, and it is from the great books that have stood the test of time that we shall get, not only the most lasting pleasure, but a standard by which to measure our own thoughts, the thoughts of others, and the excellence of the literature of our own day.
Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon
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All great literature has an uncreeded and luminous theology behind it... Art [is] a form of active prayer.
Melissa Pritchard
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Christian literature makes reference to many episodes that parallel the experiences of those going a yogic way. Saint Anthony, one of the first desert mystics, frequently encountered strange and sometimes terrifying psychophysical forces while at prayer.
Willigis Jäger
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No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself
Northrop Frye
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As far as I have been able to understand, the Japanese seem to keep things close to the vest. Friendly but remote and polite to the point of being invisible. It is in the music, literature, film and art that the Japanese really seem to express themselves.
Henry Rollins
Black Flag
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The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass
Virginia Woolf
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People who are strangers to liquor are incapable of talking about literature.
Guan Moye
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It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
Terry Eagleton
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The Most Secret Quintessence of Life is an original work filled with rich, new research, relying on important primary literature which has not, until now, been plumbed and digested. In this book, Chandak Sengoopta offers both a history of hormone discovery and a chronicle of how this discovery transformed our concepts of the body and how our existing concepts of sex and sexuality, in turn, informed our concepts for understanding hormones.
Anne Fausto-Sterling
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Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.
William Styron
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Russian literature got me interested in what literature means.
Elif Batuman
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I think my books give people a language to have a conversation about God that's not religious. There isn't enough new literature that brings the conversation of God into a modern context. I love the Bible, but in the West we've analyzed it until it fits into a structure of control. We need more new stories. We need different ways of looking at things, and I think it's coming.
William P. Young
