Literature Quotes
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People don't expect too much from literature. They just want to know they're not alone with being confused.
Jonathan Ames -
Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.
Rita Dove
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The secret of literature, which conventional people don't guess, is that writers are forever looking for the surprising revelation - not for reinforcement of collective wisdom.
Carol Bly -
There has to be space for play in literature. We all need some breathing room.
Lydia Millet -
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Northrop Frye -
There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.
Raymond Carver -
At this point we've answered about every question you could possibly imagine about Deep Space Nine, so we do this thing called Theatrical Jazz, where we do a show of bits and pieces of things from plays and literature, poetry... stuff that we like. It's fun.
Rene Auberjonois -
My works are Chinese literature, which is part of world literature. They show the life of Chinese people as well as the country's unique culture and folk customs.
Guan Moye
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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 -
I am the penny whistle of American literature.
Nelson Algren -
Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage.
George Saintsbury -
Literature and art are one of a number of relationships I have with the world. Like you have relationships with your friends and a relationship with your lover and your relationship with your family and your relationship with your work - sometimes it's really great; sometimes it's non-existent, sometimes it's fruitful.
Sheila Heti -
If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
Ezra Pound -
There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.
Sherman Alexie
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This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession.
Ryszard Kapuscinski -
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 -
Life is rather above the measure of us all (save for a very few perhaps). We all need literature that is above our measure--though we may not have sufficient energy for it all the time.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
Reading is the gateway to so many things that helps makes it possible for seven billion people to live together on one planet. Literature is the great extra-somatic keeper of our knowledge of what it is to be human. Reading elevates us. We read to be our best selves.
Nicola Griffith -
The principle of literature is devotion to the particulars of life.
Carol Bly -
Before acting, I was always attracted to words, to literature - be they the words of Williams, Arthur Miller, Shakespeare or Moliere.
Michael Mando
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I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society.
Northrop Frye -
Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.
Michael Chabon -
The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.
Ezra Pound -
Literature has low enough standards. But we can avoid writing the worst literature if we make ourselves ask ourselves, every two or three sentences we write, 'Is that what I really think?'
Carol Bly