Literature Quotes
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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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I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.
Terence McKenna
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When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he's gone through, it means he was born for literature.
Edouard Bourdet
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I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.
Russell Banks
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Yeah, I think the arts and literature have always been irrevocably connected. Because if you think about it, every film script, every play, every song starts as words on the page before it is ever performed or filmed or sung.
Emma Walton Hamilton
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I believe that prizes are useful things for the disciplines, whether we are talking about chemistry or we're talking... It motivates, it, you know, inspires, it encourages and it brings, in the case of literature, it brings literature, the arts out of the ghetto.
Wole Soyinka
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No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.
Northrop Frye
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If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
Ezra Pound
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Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.
Northrop Frye
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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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If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English Literature's performing flea.
Sean O'Casey
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For my part, I wish, with Mr. Howells, that the literature of the past might be purged of all that is ugly and barbarous in it, although I should object as much as any one to having these great works weakened or falsified.
Helen Keller
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Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound
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He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
Joseph Heller
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Just as the education of nerve and sinew is vital to the excellent athlete and education of the mind is vital to the scholar, education of the conscience is vital to the truly proactive, highly effective person. Training and educating the conscience, however, requires even greater concentration, more balanced discipline, more consistently honest living. It requires regular feasting on inspiring literature, thinking noble thoughts and, above all, living in harmony with its still small voice.
Stephen Covey
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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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Perhaps the truth is that heavy literature blooms in extremes of temperature.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.
Terry Eagleton
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I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.
Stephen Fry
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The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
Northrop Frye
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Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
Bernard Berenson
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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
