Literature Quotes
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Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.
Thomas Sowell
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The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but thet are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought.
Bernard Bailyn
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Literature is the immortality of speech.
August Wilhelm von Schlegel
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My daughter is reading various Young Adult vampire stuff, and I ask her, "Is there even a bad vampire in the story?" There's always a good vampire now, but do any of them sleep in coffins? And I would bring her down to my library and say, "Here's every classic vampire literature. There are coffins, there's this, there's that," you know? "When you get to the YA stuff, you may try some of this stuff just to see where it came from."
Mike Mignola
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I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have from reading novels. The understatements in the tenor saxophone of Lester Young, the crystal, haunting, forever searching sounds of John Coltrane, and the softness and violence of Count Basie's big band - all have fired my imagination as much as anything in literature.
Ernest Gaines
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With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.
Terry Eagleton
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Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.
Northrop Frye
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Conflict is the soul of literature.
Erica Jong
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In the most absolute tranquility or in the midst of tumultuous events, in safety or danger, in innocence or corruption, we are a crowd of others. And this crowd is certainly a blessing for literature.
Elena Ferrante
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How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?
Erma Bombeck
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The very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable, until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it.
John Ruskin
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In the history and literature courses I took, epistemological questions came to interest me most. What makes one explanation of the French Revolution better than another? What makes one interpretation of "Waiting for Godot" better than another? These questions led me to philosophy and then to philosophy of science.
Elliott Sober
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What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that's my function, but from time to time it's possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.
Wole Soyinka
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Not that the writers weren't good. I believe in those books and those writers very much. It's just that in the climate it's really hard to keep the lights on and the doors open when you're selling poetry and literature that appeals to a fringe audience.
Henry Rollins
Black Flag
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Literature is for the sake of humanity.
Cynthia Ozick
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For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.
Northrop Frye
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Why would anyone be interested in my little personal story if we can do without Homer's or Shakespeare's? Someone who truly loves literature is like a person of faith. The believer knows very well that there is nothing at all at the bureau of vital statistics about the Jesus that truly counts for him.
Elena Ferrante
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The very function of creativity, of the elaboration of the human condition only enlarges the human spirit and, I mean, as a writer I don't want to read political literature all the time. It would be terribly boring and, you know, abrasive, but just reading the insights, you know, partaking of the insights of a writer into phenomena, into society, into human relationships, both on a micro level and on a macro level, is already a function.
Wole Soyinka
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No writing is good enough until you, as an author, make a small contribution, the size of a drop, into the ocean of the world’s literature.
Nuruddin Farah
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It is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)—Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world—a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious—surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.
Walt Whitman
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In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.
Simone de Beauvoir
