Literature Quotes - Page 31

• It`s the only time my education has come in remotely handy. -on using her Russian literature studies for copying her "Van Helsing" script into Russian to acquire a Slavic accent.

  Kate Beckinsale

  Copying, Scripts, Study

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• More than any other contemporary British playwright, Tom Stoppard populates his plays -- from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to The Invention of Love (his portrait of the poet and scholar A. E. Housman) -- with characters from life and literature. But one cannot always tell the difference between those who are real and those who are imaginary.

  Mel Gussow

  Real, Character, Play

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• We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our life stories and – equally important – to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others.

  Maureen Corrigan

  Two, Understanding, Important

  Maureen Corrigan (2007). “Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books”, p.55, Vintage

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• There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing.

  Francine Prose

  Occasions

  Francine Prose (2009). “Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them”, p.25, Harper Collins

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• I'm a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela's famous novel 'The Underdogs,' and that says a lot about who they are and the music they make.

  Daniel Alarcon

  Names, Underdog, Band

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• Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary.

  Alberto Manguel

  Reality, Doe, Deals

  Alberto Manguel (2010). “A Reader on Reading”, p.106, Yale University Press

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• When literature is discovered,
  a revelation occurs: the joyful,
  exultant knowledge that
  anything can happen.

  Alberto Manguel

  Joyful, Revelations, Anything Can Happen

  Alberto Manguel (1983). “Black water: the book of fantastic literature”, Three Rivers Press

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• What lasts is what is written. We look to literature to find the essence of an age.

  Peter Brodie

  Essence, Age, Looks

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• It is possible that the malice of writers has been overrated (by myself among others). Reading their ruminations on their craft, one sees why this writer could not possibly like that one, would indeed consider him a menace. Literature is a battleground of conflicting faiths, and nobler passions than envy are involved.

  Wilfrid Sheed

  Reading, Passion, Envy

  Wilfrid Sheed (1978). “The good word and other words”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Book, Writing

  C. S. Lewis (2002). “On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature”, p.58, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Sex is the ... tremulous and bewildering and nerve-racking and delicious and myriad-adjectived soul-condition ... generally known as love. Ninety-nine point nine repeater percent of the world's literature has been devoted to its analysis. It's therefore of some importance.

  William John Locke

  Sex, Ninety Nine, Soul

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• Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the language of "creation."

  Paul Valery

  Idols, Essence, Principles

  "Littérature". Book by Paul Valery, 1930.

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• One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.

  Anais Nin

  Truth, Hypocrisy, Deception

  "The Diary Of Anais Nin, Vol. 5 (1947-1955)". Book by Anais Nin, 1975.

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• In fiction, I have been on a Zweig kick. In England over December, I noticed that many British newspapers' year-end recommenders were praising the Pushkin Press for reissuing several works by Stefan Zweig, a brilliant Austrian writer whose work brings to mind that of his compatriot Joseph Roth... these fictions are a treat of prewar European literature

  Sylvia Brownrigg

  Years, Year End, Mind

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• People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

  Doris Lessing

  Thinking, People, Mind

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• Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Art, Real, Practice

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

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• Be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honorable augmentations to your arms, not constitute the coat or fill the escutcheon!

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Men, Coats, Letters

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1856). “The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions”, p.320

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• Never pursue literature as a trade.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Trade, Pursue

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Nelson Coleridge, Sara Coleridge Coleridge (1847). “Biographia Literaria; Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions”, p.231

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• The Victorians needed parody. Without it their literature would have been a rank and weedy growth, over-watered with tears.

  Stephen Leacock

  Growth, Tears, Parody

  Stephen Leacock, Gerald Lynch (2002). “Leacock on Life”, p.131, University of Toronto Press

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• God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Attitude, Sick, People

  Ernest Hemingway (2008). “The Good Life According to Hemingway”, Ecco

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• A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.

  John Keats

  Poetry, Identity, Body

  John Keats (1994). “The Works of John Keats: With an Introduction and Bibliography”, p.9, Wordsworth Editions

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• All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.

  George Steiner

  Art, Criticism, Phrases

  George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.11, Faber & Faber

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• To a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the flattery of academic and hermeneutic notice. Reciprocally, the academy turns towards that which appears to require its exegetic, cryptographic skills.

  George Steiner

  Art, Skills, Degrees

  George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.43, Faber & Faber

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• Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large.

  George Steiner

  Book, World, Emancipation

  "Do Books Matter?". Book edited by Brian Baumfield, 1973.

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• There's no shortage of female role models. They're everywhere - in history, in literature, in the news. Just look around.

  Keri Russell

  Female Role Models, Roles, Looks

  Source: www.movieweb.com

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