Literature Quotes - Page 3

• He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

  Joseph Heller

  Sarcastic, Hygiene, Enjoy

  Joseph Heller (1999). “Catch-22: A Novel”, p.73, Simon and Schuster

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• Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

  Oscar Wilde

  Writing, Ignorance, Three

  Intentions "The Critic as Artist" pt. 1 (1891)

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• The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

  Elizabeth Drew

  Inspirational Life, Reading, Tests

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• Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

  Seneca the Younger

  Death, Alive, Leisure

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• How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

  Wallace Stevens

  Spirit, Humans, Terrific

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose”, p.249, Vintage

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• The only privilege literature deserves - and this privilege it requires in order to exist - is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.

  Salman Rushdie

  Struggle, Order, Arena

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• The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.

  Salman Rushdie

  Lying, Vision, Delight

  Salman Rushdie (1990). “In good faith”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.

  Cesare Pavese

  Secret, Normal, Defense

  Cesare Pavese, Alma Elizabeth Murch (1961). “This Business of Living”, p.117, Transaction Publishers

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• Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

  Ezra Pound

  Vacuums, Doe, Use

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• The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Reading, Decline, Nations

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1853). “Goethe's Opinions on the World, Mankind, Literature, Science, and Art”, p.109

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• It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

  Henry James

  History, Historical, Littles

  Hawthorne ch. 1 (1879)

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• Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

  Lionel Trilling

  Possibility, Difficulty, Complexity

  1950 The Liberal Imagination, preface.

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• 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

  Real, Writing, People

  Edith Hamilton (1957). “The Roman Way to Western Civilization”

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• In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

  Jane Austen

  Love, Romantic, Funny Relationship

  Jane Austen (1819). “Pride and Prejudice: A Novel”, p.123

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• A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Quality, Curtains

  1925 The Common Reader, 'The Modern Essay'.

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• Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honors or of wealth.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Men, Honor, Wealth

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• Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.

  Isaac D'Israeli

  Happiness, Men, Patrimony

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 461, The Literary Character, Illustrated by the History of Men of Genius (1795-1822), Chapter XXII, 1922.

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• The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

  Lionel Trilling

  Acceptance, Self, Mutation

  1965 Beyond Culture, introduction.

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• We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

  T. S. Eliot

  Religion, Littles, Too Much

  "A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry" (1928)

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• If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Philosophical, Trouble, Hours

  "Barthes: Selected Writings". Book edited by Susan Sontag, introduction "Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes", 1982.

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• In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Struggle, Ambition, Novices

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• In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

  Northrop Frye

  Art, Law, Elements

  Northrop Frye, Germaine Warkentin (2006). “Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962”, p.215, University of Toronto Press

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• As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

  Wallace Stevens

  Terrible, Grows

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose”, p.241, Vintage

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• Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing - he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.

  Lionel Trilling

  Writing, Judging, Giving

  Lionel Trilling, Leon Wieseltier (2009). “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays”, p.552, Northwestern University Press

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• English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.

  Marilyn Butler

  Creativity, Training, Body

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