Great Literature Quotes - Page 3

• Mrs. James, my fifth-grade teacher, introduced us to some of the great literature of African American culture. I won my first blue ribbon reciting the vernacular poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, in particular "Little Brown Baby."

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Baby, Teacher, Blue

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Nothing better protects a human being against the stupidity of prejudice, racism, religious or political sectarianism, and exclusivist nationalism than this truth that invariably appears in great literature: that men and women of all nations and places are essentially equal, and only injustice sows among them discrimination, fear, and exploitation.

  Mario Vargas Llosa

  Religious, Men, Racism

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• There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.

  Ernest Hemingway

  America, And Love, Literature

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• This act of empathy, that women go through from the time we're little girls - we read all of literature, all of history, it's really about boys, most of it. But I can feel more like Peter Pan than Tinker Bell, or like Wendy. I wanted to be Tom Sawyer, not Becky. And we're so used to that act of empathizing with the protagonist of a male-driven plot. I mean, that's what we've done all our lives. You read history, you read great literature, Shakespeare, it's all fellas, you know?

  Meryl Streep

  Girl, Mean, Boys

  Source: blankonblank.org

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• The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."

  Kate Zambreno

  Female, Literature, Form

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Literature has done great work for feminism - writing and reading are a practice of empathy - and great literature will continue to do so.

  Julianna Baggott

  Reading, Writing, Practice

  Interview with Roxane Gay, therumpus.net. May 11, 2012.

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• As far as people communicating with each other well I think that listening is important. You know really trying to read between the lines of what some body is saying and trying to read their mind a little bit where there at because most people don't really say what they're feeling. Which is the bones of great literature.

  Joy Behar

  Thinking, People, Feelings

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• Inequality may linger in the world of material things, but great music, great literature, great art and the wonders of science are, and should be, open to all.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Art, Literature, World

  Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1938). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: F.D. Roosevelt, 1936, Volume 5”, p.84, Best Books on

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• All great literature has an uncreeded and luminous theology behind it... Art [is] a form of active prayer.

  Melissa Pritchard

  Art, Prayer, Literature

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• Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds.

  Donald Hall

  Eye, Sound, Ears

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• There's something in human nature, the trying-to-get-on-with-it quality of people, the struggle to maintain or keep the show going can be exhausting. It just seems like that element of trying to move forward while things are breaking down... Obviously, it's always been the backdrop for a lot of great literature and great cinematic characters, but aside from that, I'm just drawn to it because that feels honest to me.

  Greg Kinnear

  Moving, Struggle, Character

  Source: film.avclub.com

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• All great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature.

  Walter Mosley

  One Day, Literature, Today

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. November 10, 2010.

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• Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Relief, Literature, Realizing

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• Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

  Francoise Sagan

  Art, Believe, Opposites

  "Françoise Sagan, The Art of Fiction No. 15". Interview with Blair Fuller and Robert B. Silvers, www.theparisreview.org. Autumn 1956.

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• In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Different, Literature

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• But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

  C. S. Lewis

  Reading, Eye, Night

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “An Experiment in Criticism”, p.141, Cambridge University Press

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• All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Writing, Journey, Men

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• I doubt if anything learnt at school is of more value than great literature learnt by heart.

  Richard Livingstone

  Heart, School, Doubt

  Richard Livingstone (2013). “On Education”, p.101, Cambridge University Press

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• Literature bores me, especially great literature

  John Berryman

  Literature, Bores

  John Berryman (2014). “77 Dream Songs: Poems”, p.16, Macmillan

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• Perhaps the most surprising thing about mathematics is that it is so surprising. The rules which we make up at the beginning seem ordinary and inevitable, but it is impossible to foresee their consequences. These have only been found out by long study, extending over many centuries. Much of our knowledge is due to a comparatively few great mathematicians such as Newton, Euler, Gauss, or Riemann; few careers can have been more satisfying than theirs. They have contributed something to human thought even more lasting than great literature, since it is independent of language.

  Edward Charles Titchmarsh

  Independent, Careers, Long

  "Mathematical Maxims and Minims". Book by Nicholas J. Rose, 1986.

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• And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.

  Jerry Pournelle

  Literature, Stuff, Reason

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• The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death.

  Gene Wolfe

  Sex, Mean, Fiction

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• Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.

  Russell Kirk

  Real, Purpose, Literature

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