Literature Quotes
-
The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others.
William James
-
I don't really need to be inspired by literature though. At the end of the day it's colour and imagery moved around until it works.
Danny Fox
-
The distinction between literary and genre fiction is stupid and pernicious. It dates back to a feud between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. James won, and it split literature into two streams. But it's a totally false dichotomy.
George R. R. Martin
-
Before acting, I was always attracted to words, to literature - be they the words of Williams, Arthur Miller, Shakespeare or Moliere.
Michael Mando
-
Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.
Stephen Fry
-
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
-
God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature.
Ernest Hemingway
-
The heart is a small thing, but desireth great matters. It is not sufficient for a kite's dinner, yet the whole world is not sufficient for it.
Francis Quarles
-
Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable - not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.... You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent - you learn, in a word, femininity.
Catharine MacKinnon
-
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.
Terry Eagleton
-
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
-
Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
Mark Haddon