Literature is the question minus the answer. — Roland Barthes
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. — Juan Ramon Jimenez
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. — Iris Murdoch
Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness. — F. R. Leavis
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. — Fernando Pessoa
A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can. — Edith Hamilton
We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it. — F. Sionil José
Literature has the power to change lives, minds, and hearts. — Cam'ron
Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers. — Carlos Fuentes
Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement. — Glen Duncan
Literature is air, and Im suffocating in mediocrity. — Armand Assante
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas! — D. H. Lawrence
Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. — Wendy Lesser
Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them. — Emile Zola
Short Literature Quotes
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. — Leo Tolstoy
Those who don't believe in magic will never find it. — Roald Dahl
I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books. — Gary Paulsen
Understanding something in one way does not preclude understanding it in other ways. — Jerome Bruner
In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice. — Marquis De Sade
It is not possible either to trick or escape the mind of Zeus. — Hesiod
Love your neighbor as yourself but don't take down your fence. — Carl Sandburg
Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent. — Henry David Thoreau
One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all. — Harold Pinter
Literature Image Quotes
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture. — Ezra Pound
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of ethical change. — Lafcadio Hearn
Russian Literature Quotes
Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets. — Joseph Brodsky
I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart. — Ryszard Kapuscinski
I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much. — Vladimir Putin
Persecution mania is still around. In your writing, in your exchanges with people, meeting people who are in Russian affairs, Russian literature, etcetera. — Joseph Brodsky
Russia is a place of great culture. If you've read Tolstoy's "War and Peace", Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov...the culture of the great Russian literature is amazing. The human narrative you get out of "War and Peace" is universal. — Andre Leon Talley
The greatest books in Russian literature are satires. Gogol's Dead Souls, for example, is a very over-the-top satire about life in Russia. I think it's the thing we do best. — Gary Shteyngart
In communist Russia, their major organ was Pravda, which means "truth." The Russians knew how to read between the lines. They didn't take their literature literally. — Raymond Pettibon
The whole world recognizes Russia's cultural achievements. It is impossible to imagine the world culture without Russian culture, without our music and literature. — Vladimir Putin
Importance Of Literature Quotes
The power of literature to foster empathy is one of the most important ways in which it contributes to our understanding of the world. — Martha C. Nussbaum
I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century. — Tom Wolfe
The excellence of this important contribution to genre literature CANNOT be overstated A masterwork. — William F. Nolan
The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic. — Leslie Fiedler
No matter how much someone may irritate me, I have no right to puff myself up with my own self-importance so as to declare that person to be absolutely incompetent, assuming a posture of disdain from my own position of false superiority. — Paulo Freire
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 literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship. — George Packer
Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world. — Alain de Botton
I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction! — Philip Pullman
I don't see myself as a very important person. But I was the second woman to write a novel in Iran, and I have written most of the novels about Iranian women. In this way, maybe I have a good place in Iranian literature. — Shahrnush Parsipur
Romantic Literature Quotes
You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. -Mr. Darcy — Jane Austen
Each time you happen to me all over again. — Edith Wharton
When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. — Louis de Bernieres
I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. — Charles Dickens
You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful. — John Green
Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. — Charlotte Bronte
You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope...I have loved none but you. — Jane Austen
He doesn't love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms. — Willis George Emerson
Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying. — Oscar Wilde
I do love nothing in the world so well as you- is not that strange? — William Shakespeare
American Literature Quotes
While Americans have heard of Darfur and think we should be doing more there, they aren't actually angry at the president about inaction — Nicholas D. Kristof
I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of. — Dashiell Hammett
I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. — Leslie Marmon Silko
All that happens is that the destruction of human beings - unless they're Americans - is called collateral damage. — Harold Pinter
The American soldier is quick in adapting himself to a new mode of living. Outfits which have been here only three days have dug vast networks of ditches three feet deep in the bare brown earth. They have rigged up a light here and there with a storage battery. — Ernie Pyle
I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers. — Diane Wakoski
Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites...some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way. — Tony Kushner
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. — Ernest Hemingway
Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead. — Sinclair Lewis
Reading Literature Quotes
Don’t just teach your children to read… Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything. — George Carlin
We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement. — B. F. Skinner
If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us. — Franz Kafka
That's what books are for... to travel without moving an inch. — Jhumpa Lahiri
Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction. — Joan D. Vinge
There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature. — P. G. Wodehouse
My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection. — Ryszard Kapuscinski
A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the pa — Ambrose Bierce
I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own. — Jeffrey Eugenides
A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. — George R. R. Martin
Love Literature Quotes
When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars. — David Guterson
People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation. — Elias Canetti
No one who loves life can ignore literature, and no one who loves literature can ignore life. — Laura Esquivel
Whilst in Prussia poets only speak of the love of country as one of the dearest of all human affections, here there is no man who does not feel, and describe with rapture, how much he loves his country. — Karl Philipp Moritz
There's no love more intense than the love we have for our kids - and where there is intense love, there is also intense fear lurking beneath the surface. — Arianna Huffington
It is not opinions that man needs: it is TRUTH. It is not theology; it is God. It is not religion: it is Christ. It is not literature and science; but the knowledge of the free love of God in the gift of His only-begotten Son. — Horatius Bonar
Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand. — Margery Williams
There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature. — Stephen Stills
I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process. — Jorge Luis Borges
When we no longer have good cooking in the world, we will have no literature, nor high and sharp intelligence, nor friendly gatherings, no social harmony. — Marie-Antoine Careme
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. — Aldous Huxley
How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions? — Polly Toynbee
It is my earnest hope, and indeed the hope of all mankind, that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past... — Douglas MacArthur
Literature provides us with the opportunity to escape into fictional worlds that are ultimately rooted in human universals shaped by common biological forces. — Gad Saad
Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you. — Roald Dahl
I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large. — Kenzaburo Oe
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial. — Henry David Thoreau
So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world. — E. O. Wilson
Literature And Art Quotes
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't. — Jean-Luc Godard
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't. — JeanLuc Godard
If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it. — Andrew Denton
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. — Steven Pinker
Nearly everything that defines much of our daily experiences is consummatory in nature. Yes, we consume products and services. But we also consume life experiences, religious narratives, art, literature, and ideas. — Gad Saad
Man needs music, literature, and painting - all those oases of perfection that make up art - to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life. — Fernando Botero
All art, literature, and music must be born in your heart's blood. Art is your heart's blood. — Edvard Munch
Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments. — Elbert Hubbard
The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end. — Clement Greenberg
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics. — Yevgeny Zamyatin
Children Literature Quotes
'Oh, yes,' nodded Pollyanna emphatically. 'He said he felt better right away, that first day he thought to count 'em. He said if God took the trouble to tell us eight hundred times to be glad and rejoice, He must want us to do it - some. — Eleanor Porter
Good children's literature appeals not only to the child in the adult, but to the adult in the child. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. — Roald Dahl
There is no such thing as children’s literature. — N. V. M. Gonzalez
Every year 3.1 million Indian children die before the age of 5, mostly from diseases of poverty like diarrhea. — Nicholas D. Kristof
A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy. — Astrid Lindgren
Why did you do all this for me?' he asked. 'I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.' 'You have been my friend,' replied Charlotte. 'That in itself is a tremendous thing. — E. B. White
A children's writer should, ideally, be a dedicated semi-lunatic, a kind of poet with a marvelous idea, who, preferably, when not committing the marvellous idea to paper, does something else of a quite different kind, so as to acquire new and rich experience. — Joan Aiken
I loved The Wind in the Willows. ... Walt Disney should be sued for cheapening it as he did. Imagine it, Mickey Mousing all those nice characters. I'm surprised he didn't do it with the New Testament. — Tasha Tudor
Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time. — James M. Barrie
Children's Literature Quotes
One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. — Frances Hodgson Burnett
A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. — Roald Dahl
Humor is the oxygen of children's literature. There's a lot of competition for children's time, but even kids who hate to read want to read a funny book. — Sid Fleischman
I don't think I'm essentially interested in children's books. I'm interested in writing, and in pictures. I'm interested in people and in children because they are people. — Margaret Wise Brown
People didn't make life, so they can't destroy it. Even if we were to wipe out every bit of life in the world, we can't touch the place life comes from. Whatever made the plants and animals and people spring up in the first place will always be there, and life will spring up again. — Jeanne DuPrau
The only books that work are those which fly through the air - the ones you let happen, not make happen. — Rosemary Wells
Quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times, a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own. — Margaret Wise Brown
A child... who has learned from fairy stories to believe that what at first seemed a repulsive, threatening figure can magically change into a most helpful friend is ready to believe that a strange child whom he meets and fears may also be changed from a menace into a desirable companion. — Bruno Bettelheim
There are people whom even children's literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalter and in the Wisdom of Solomon. — Anton Chekhov
The work of one author or artist may stimulate another author or artist to push the edge, to take the risk, to go where the field hasn't gone before. The result -very exciting children's literature and art ... exciting both for the professional and for the intended audience, the children. — Sayings
Literature History Quotes
I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature. — Muhammad Iqbal
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is. — David McCullough
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. — Barbara Tuchman
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. — George Saintsbury
In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations. — Anne Bogart
Don’t learn literature from a history teacher. — Vijay Kedia
True education does not consist merely in the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but in the development of character. — David O. Mckay
It’s not rocket science. It’s social science – the science of understanding people’s needs and their unique relationship with art, literature, history, music, work, philosophy, community, technology and psychology. The act of design is structuring and creating that balance. — Clement Mok
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. — Henry James
In schoolbooks and in literature we can separate ecclesiastical and political history; in the life of mankind they are intertwined. — Leopold Von Ranke
Literary Quotes
What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. — Joseph Pulitzer
Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world. — Samuel Johnson
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work. — Johannes V. Jensen
The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work. — Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Women need to become literary "criminals," break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives. — Kathy Acker
It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. — Robert Morgan
When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling. — Ted Rall
Bolshevism is knocking at our gates, we can't afford to let it in...We must keep America whole and safe and unspoiled. We must keep the worker away from red literature and red ruses; we must see that his mind remains healthy. — Al Capone
I'm a big skeptic so I won't just go off what an individual may tell me. I gotta do the research. I'ma get different literature on that one subject and just compare and contrast. I do my own selective studies. — Kevin Gates
Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to think; it is the acquisition of many specialized abilities for thinking about a variety of things. — Lev S. Vygotsky
Childhood is a complex dialectical process characterized by periodicity, unevenness in the development of different functions, metamorphosis or qualitative transformation of one form into another, intertwining of external and internal factors, and adaptive processes which overcome impediments that the child encounters. — Lev S. Vygotsky
The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other peoples eyes. All good books do this. — Sandra Cisneros
People always seem to assume that we have a full, back-up support team - make-up, costume and a driver - but usually, in a war zone, there's only me and the cameraman. — Kate Adie
With our short sight we affect to take a comprehensive view of eternity. Our horizon is the universe. — Paul Laurence Dunbar
Marriage is like twirling a baton, turning hand springs or eating with chopsticks. It looks easy until you try it. — Helen Rowland
I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy. — Jeanette Winterson
I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like. — Don Delillo
Know how and how much to tip people who expect gratuities, even in the case of poor service. — Marilyn vos Savant
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth. — Edward Dahlberg
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it. — Elizabeth Bowen
Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian. — Ama Ata Aidoo
In Conclusion
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