Literature Quotes
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Increasingly, those who used to teach and write critical or theoretical texts are writing fiction, poetry and so on; and kinds of texts are being produced that call for budding readers rather different from those who studied literature in the past.
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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.
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No medium is more limited than any other. It's what a person does with it. We could talk about the differences between music and literature and photography, sure, but it really comes down to what a person does.
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For those of us who take literature very seriously, picking up a work of fiction is the start of an adventure comparable in anticipatory excitement to what I imagine is felt by an athlete warming up for a competition, a mountain climber preparing for the ascent: it is the beginning of a process whose outcome is unknown, one that promises the thrill and elation of success but may as easily end in bitter disappointment. Committed readers realize at a certain point that literature is where we have learned a good part of the little we know about living.
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Few nations match our rich resource of literature.
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I never liked to hunt, you know. There was always the danger of having a horse fall on you.
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I'm not so sure that horror should be dismissed as something less than literature.
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This kind of give-and-take lies at the heart of scientific progress and is precisely why scientific analyses are made available in the open literature.
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Give thy mind to books and libraries, and the literature and lore of the ages will give thee the wisdom of sage and seer.
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My mother's influence in molding my character was conspicuous. She forced me to learn daily long chapters of the Bible by heart. To that discipline and patient, accurate resolve I owe not only much of my general power of taking pains, but of the best part of my taste for literature.
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This profession photography is deserving of attention and respect equal to that accorded painting, literature, music and architecture.
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The hard-drinking newspaperman is, or used to be, a stock character of fiction. Now he is being phased out of literature just as he is being phased out of life.
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Book critics certainly are judges who wield a tremendous amount of power in terms of whether or not a book will reach a wider audience. That's one of the reasons why I try to give coverage to books written by Latinx writers; too many worthwhile works of literature do not get the kind of coverage they deserve, and I've certainly seen that with respect to books written by writers of color. But there are some wonderful, diverse writers out there who mentor and otherwise support those voices that often have been ignored by much of the mainstream press.
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People didn't vote for me because they thought I was a racist and if you look at my campaign literature it is not much different than a lot of Republican literature and some conservative Democrats in the South.
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There is a cheap literature that speaks to us of the need of escape. It is true that when we travel we are in search of distance. But distance is not to be found. It melts away. And escape has never led anywhere. The moment a man finds that he must play the races, go the Arctic, or make war in order to feel himself alive, that man has begin to spin the strands that bind him to other men and to the world. But what wretched strands! A civilization that is really strong fills man to the brim, though he never stir. What are we worth when motionless, is the question.
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Education is not a discipline at all. Half vocational, half emptiness dressed up in garments borrowed from philosophy, psychology, literature.
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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.
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You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action.
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Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is 'ten times nature'.
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Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions.
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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
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It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
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A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
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When I was in high school I found literature and history interesting, but science not at all. Literature and history obviously involved thinking, but science seemed to be all about memorizing facts and doing mindless calculations.
