Literature Quotes - Page 34

• Sanity -- that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.

  Matthew Arnold

  Ancient Literature, Want, Sanity

  Matthew Arnold, Robert Henry Super (1960). “On the Classical Tradition”, p.17, University of Michigan Press

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• Originality in literature is only a new coat of paint on an old house.

  Austin O'Malley

  House, Coats, Originality

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• An understandable hunger for potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, immune to the methods of factory farming.

  Alain de Botton

  Teacher, Writing, Careers

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2009.

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• My books have done extremely well, I know. But I don't honestly feel much different from when I began to write. I still think we have a long way to go. I suppose my name means more in Nigeria today than it did five years ago. But I feel the job that literature should do in our community has not even started. It's not yet part of the life of the nation. We are still at the beginning. It's a big beginning, because now we are catching the next generation in the schools. When I was their age, I had nothing to read that had any relevance to my own environment.

  Chinua Achebe

  Jobs, Book, Mean

  Chinua Achebe, Bernth Lindfors (1997). “Conversations with Chinua Achebe”, p.19, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I don't wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature.

  Philip Roth

  Wish, Slave, Be A Slave

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• I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk.

  Philip Roth

  Book, Fighting, Years

  "'It No Longer Feels a Great Injustice That I Have to Die'". Interview with Martin Krasnik, www.theguardian.com. December 14, 2005.

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• All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents.

  Laura Riding

  Writing, May, Young

  "Anarchism Is Not Enough". Book by Laura Riding. Chapter: "All Literature", 1928.

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• Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. It deepens our natural sensibilities, and strengthens by exercise our intellectual capacities. It stores up the accumulated experience of the race, connecting Past and Present into a conscious unity; and with this store it feeds successive generations, to be fed in turn by them.

  George Henry Lewes

  Exercise, Past, Race

  "The Principles of Success in Literature". The Fortnightly Review, Volume 1, www.gutenberg.org. 1865.

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• It is always understood as an expression of condemnation when anything in Literature or Art is said to be done for effect; and yet to produce an effect is the aim and end of both.

  George Henry Lewes

  Art, Expression, Done

  George Henry Lewes (1891). “The Principles of Success in Literature”

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• With some exceptions in science fiction and other genres I have small difficulty in avoiding anything that could be called American literature. I feel it is unnatural, not I think entirely because it uses a language that is not mine, however closely akin to my own.

  Kingsley Amis

  Thinking, Fiction, Use

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• Whatever Kurt Vonnegut's ultimate status will be in the annals of literature, he was important to a lot of people right now. That's what most writers really care about.

  Michael Dirda

  People, Important, Care

  "Kurt Vonnegut". Live discussion, www.washingtonpost.com. April 12, 2007.

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• I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That's my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.

  Karl Marlantes

  Character, Long, World

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• Mathematics to me is like a language I don’t speak though I admire its literature in translation.

  David Quammen

  Language, Speak, Mathematics

  "Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic". Book by David Quammen, 2012.

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• I was really exposed to great old-time literature - the classics, the poetic realists like Strindberg and Ibsen and all those guys. I was really inspired by all those guys. That's when writing became a primary focus.

  Kurt Sutter

  Writing, Focus, Guy

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• Literature can no longer be either Mimesis or Mathesis but merely Semiosis, the adventure of what is impossible to language, in a word: Text (it is wrong to say that the notion of 'text' repeats the notion of 'literature': literature represents a finite world, the text figures the infinite of language).

  Roland Barthes

  Adventure, World, Mimesis

  Roland Barthes (1994). “Roland Barthes”

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• The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes.

  George Eliot

  Hero, Years, Land

  Daniel Deronda bk. 6, ch. 42 (1876)

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• We are apt to imagine that this hubbub of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle. But if a man sleeps soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Philosophy, Sunset, Sleep

  Henry David Thoreau (1973). “Winter: From the Journal of Henry David Thoreau”

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• My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Fall, Rocks, Wife

  D. H. Lawrence, James T. Boulton (2000). “The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence”, p.69, Cambridge University Press

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• Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print," it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Spiritual, Memories, Heart

  Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's Nobel lecture in literature delivered only to the Swedish Academy, www.nobelprize.org. 1970.

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• Literature, like memory, selects only the vivid patches.

  T. E. Hulme

  Memories, Vivid, Patches

  T. E. Hulme, Patrick McGuinness (2003). “Selected Writings”, p.57, Psychology Press

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• Literature is the voice of the age and the state; the character, energy, and resources of the country are reflected and imaged forth in the conceptions of its great minds; they are organs of the time; they speak not their own language, they scarce think their own thoughts; but under an impulse like the prophetic enthusiasm of old, they must feel and utter the sentiments which society inspires.

  Edward Everett

  Country, Character, Thinking

  Edward Everett (1839). “Selections from the Works of Edward Everett: With a Sketch of His Life”, p.127

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• Perhaps the chief cause which has retarded the progress of poetry in America, is the want of that exclusive cultivation, which so noble a branch of literature would seem to require. Few here think of relying upon the exertion of poetic talent for a livelihood, and of making literature the profession of life. The bar or the pulpit claims the greater part of the scholar's existence, and poetry is made its pastime.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Thinking, America, Progress

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, J. D. McClatchy (2000). “Poems and Other Writings”, p.794, Library of America

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• I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.

  Sinclair Lewis

  Country, Art, Architecture

  Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Sinclair Lewis (1931). “Why Sinclair Lewis got the Nobel prize”

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• While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Plot, Conscious, Figures

  "Laws of Media: The New Science". Book by Marshall McLuhan, co-written with Eric McLuhan, p. 52, 1988.

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• Le mensonge et les vers de tout temps sont amis. Lies and literature have always been friends.

  Jean de La Fontaine

  Lying

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