Literature Quotes - Page 36

• You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant.

  Doris Lessing

  Men, Self, Female

  Doris May Lessing (1996). “Putting questions differently: interviews with Doris Lessing, 1964-1994”

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• Whether we know it or not, we are all in a quest after the Great Companion. All study, all art, all music, all literature, all government, all industry are in essence a search after the Infinite.

  Lyman Abbott

  Art, Government, Essence

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• Judge and prosecutor had hammered it home that Lady Chatterly was an immoral woman, that she had had sexual relations before marriage, that she had committed adultery under her husband's roof; as if these charges somehow disqualified her from participation in serious literature. Indeed, there were long periods of the trial during which an outsider might well have assumed that a divorce case was being heard.

  Kenneth Tynan

  Husband, Home, Divorce

  "Lady Chatterly's Trial (The Old Bailey, 20 October - 2 November 1960)". "Tynan Right and Left: Plays, Films, People, Places and Events". Book by Kenneth Tynan, p. 409, 1967.

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• Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living.

  Gregory Benford

  Voice, Forever, Conversation

  "Timescape". Book by Gregory Benford, 1980.

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• Winning the Nobel Prize does not automatically qualify you to be commander in chief. I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don't need to care about science, literature or peace.

  Stephen Colbert

  Winning, Thinking, President

  "A Mock Columnist, Amok" by Maureen Dowd, www.nytimes.com. October 14, 2007.

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• What an artist does, is fail. Any reading of the literature, (I mean the literature of artistic creation), however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition. There is something "out there" which cannot be brought "here". This is standard. I don't mean bad artists, I mean good artists. There is no such thing as a "successful artist" (except, of course, in worldly terms).

  Donald Barthelme

  Art, Reading, Mean

  "The Sandman". "Sadness". Book by Donald Barthelme, 1972.

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• His examiner said severely: "Baskerville, you blank round, discursiveness is not literature."
  "The aim of literature," Baskerville replied grandly, "is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart."

  Donald Barthelme

  Heart, Fur, Strange

  "Florence Green is 81". "Come Back, Dr. Caligari". Book by Donald Barthelme, 1964.

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• Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature.

  Lionel Trilling

  Religious, Exercise, Age

  "The Portable Matthew Arnold " by Lionel Trilling, Viking Press, 1949.

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• American literature was enriched with Men Who Loved Allison .... Of the actual and eventual worth of this romance I cannot pretend to be an unprejudiced judge. The tale seems to me one of those many books which have profited, very dubiously indeed, by having obtained, in one way of another, the repute of being indecent.

  James Branch Cabell

  Book, Men, Judging

  James Branch Cabell (2003). “Preface to the Past”, p.213, Wildside Press LLC

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• If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English Literature's performing flea.

  Sean O'Casey

  Way, Fleas, England

  Sean O'Casey (1975). “The Letters of Sean O'Casey: 1910-41”, Catholic University of America Press

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• Such a superiority do the pursuits of literature possess above every other occupation, that even he who attains but a mediocrity in them, merits the pre-eminence above those that excel the most in the common and vulgar professions.

  David Hume

  Mediocrity, Occupation, Merit

  David Hume (1782). “The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688”, p.197

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• I must confess that I and a few others are burdened with heavy responsibilities regarding the future of criticism. I am certainly, if not the inventor, then at least one of the first systematizers of an absurd critical practice that, as soon as it had peeked its beak out of the nest, flapping its new wet wings, took flight in the minds of the young, becoming a wild ox and sowing avant-garde literature with the mighty tomes of what might as well be called the abstract bear.

  Louis Aragon

  Responsibility, Practice, Wings

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• The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.

  Alan Bennett

  Running, School, Class

  1968 Forty Years On (published 1969), act 2. Snobbery With Violence was used as a book title by Colin Wilson (1971).

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• The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.

  Northrop Frye

  Philosophy, Mythology, Imaginative

  Northrop Frye, Robert D. Denham (2003). “Northrop Frye's Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts”, p.158, University of Toronto Press

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• Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.

  Northrop Frye

  Principles, Stories, Sun

  1971 The Bush Garden,'Conclusion'.

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• The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.

  Northrop Frye

  Thinking, Answers, Kind

  Northrop Frye, Germaine Warkentin (2006). “Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962”, p.437, University of Toronto Press

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• Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.

  Northrop Frye

  Imagination, Study, Language

  Northrop Frye, Germaine Warkentin (2006). “Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962”, p.484, University of Toronto Press

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• Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.

  Northrop Frye

  Teaching, Impossible, Difficult

  Northrop Frye (2014). “The Northrop Frye Quote Book”, p.313, Dundurn

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• No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.

  Northrop Frye

  Magic, Kind, Embedded

  Northrop Frye, Germaine Warkentin (2006). “Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962”, p.447, University of Toronto Press

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• This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.

  Northrop Frye

  Loss, Thinking, Identity

  Northrop Frye (1964). “The Educated Imagination”, p.55, Indiana University Press

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• What is art is not likely to be decided for decades or longer after the work has been producedand then is often redecidedso we must not think badly if we regard literature as entertainment rather than as transcendent enlightenment.

  Richard Condon

  Art, Thinking, Enlightenment

  1976 Comment in D L Fitzpatrick (ed) Contemporary Novelists.

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• Is it not singular how some men continue to obtain the reputation of popular authorship without adding a word to the literature of their country worthy of note?? To puff and to get one's self puffed have become different branches of a new profession.

  Anthony Trollope

  Country, Men, Self

  'The Way We Live Now' (1875) ch. 1

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• The clerical work is par for the course. "Keep on file in numerical order" means throw in wastebasket. You'll soon learn the language. "Let it be a challenge to you" means you're stuck with it; "interpersonal relationships" is a fight between kids; "ancillary civic agencies for supportive discipline" means call the cops; "Language Arts Dept." is the English office; "literature based on child's reading level and experiential background" means that's all they've got in the Book Room; "non-academic-minded" is a delinquent; and "It has come to my attention" means you're in trouble.

  Bel Kaufman

  Art, Children, Reading

  Bel Kaufman (2012). “Up the Down Staircase”, p.49, Open Road Media

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• When an Englishman has professed his belief in the supremacy of Shakespeare amongst all poets, he feels himself excused from the general study of literature. He also feels himself excused from the particular study of Shakespeare.

  Aubrey Beardsley

  Belief, Study, Poet

  "Under the Hill and Other Essays". Book by Aubrey Beardsley, 1904.

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• Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.

  Terry Eagleton

  Reading, Practice, Process

  "Literary Theory: An Introduction". Book by Terry Eagleton, 1983.

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