Literature Quotes - Page 38

• In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now?

  Dana Gioia

  Voice, Age, Purpose

  "Fallen Western Star". Denver Quarterly, Fall 1998.

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• A piece of literature can be many things but first of all it must capture its audience. You need to seduce people, entice them into a world of beauty and horror, light and shadow, of passion, of romance, of mystery. That's the magic of it. Beyond that, of course, you can open a dialogue about the ideas which interest you, but first of all you absolutely must get inside people's minds.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Passion, Ideas, Light

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• No refining of one's taste in matters of art or literature, no sharpening of one's powers of insight in matters of science or psychology, can ever take the place of one's sensitiveness to the life of the earth. This is the beginning and the end of a person's true education.

  John Cowper Powys

  Art, Psychology, Matter

  "The Meaning of Culture". Book by John Cowper Powys, p. 175, 1936.

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• You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.

  Chris Abani

  Darkness, Style, Kind

  Interview with Amy Sutherland, www.bostonglobe.com. March 22, 2014.

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• We think literature is immortal, but even that decays and ultimately turns to dust.

  Mick Farren

  Thinking, Dust, Decay

  Mick Farren (2010). “Darklost”, p.170, Macmillan

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• I appreciate good criticism and I think it's really important. I don't like it when it's consumer advocacy, like how you should spend your $60. Great criticism is a kind of literature. I've written some criticism, and I really enjoy it because I think it's important for people to know that theatre is vital. Criticism is really unevenly distributed in this town. Obviously the power of the Times is discouraging. It's killing new plays, demolishing one after another.

  Adam Rapp

  Thinking, Play, People

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• Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers.

  Roberto Bolano

  Flower, Lakes, Mushrooms

  "2666: A Novel". Book by Roberto Bolaño, 2008.

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• There’s always been a need for horror fiction, though - ghost stories have been a staple of every human society since the beginning of recorded literature - and while commercially the field may have its ups and downs, it will never go away. Hell, look at the Bible: gods, devils, ghosts, witches, giants, resurrections. That’s one big horror story. And it’s the most popular book on the planet.

  Bentley Little

  Book, Ghost Stories, Horror Stories

  "Bentley Little: The Elusive Dark Scribe Speaks". Interview with Vince A. Liaguno, www.darkscribemagazine.com. September 13, 2007.

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• I suppose that literature as it is won't die, science fiction included. But games are becoming an extremely important part of the science fiction world, including games that are adapted from books (or vice versa: books that are adapted from games). It's wonderful to have the opportunity to play and see your favorite characters on the screen, but the opportunity to read a book does not become less attractive.

  Sergei Lukyanenko

  Book, Character, Opportunity

  "Watching The Watches: An Interview With Sergei Lukyanenko". Interview with Nicholas Seeley, strangehorizons.com. November 28, 2011.

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• Long ago, during my apprenticeship in the wine trade, I learned that wine is more than the sum of its parts, and more than an expression of its physical origin. The real significance of wine as the nexus of just about everything became clearer to me when I started writing about it. The more I read, the more I traveled, and the more questions I asked, the further I was pulled into the realms of history and economics, politics, literature, food, community, and all else that affects the way we live. Wine, I found, draws on everything and leads everywhere.

  Gerald Asher

  Real, Writing, Wine

  Gerald Asher (2012). “A Carafe of Red”, p.1, Univ of California Press

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• The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but thet are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought

  Bernard Bailyn

  World, Revolution, Ancient

  Bernard Bailyn (2012). “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution”, p.26, Harvard University Press

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• The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power.

  Bernard Bailyn

  Years, Political, Belief

  Bernard Bailyn (2012). “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution”, p.55, Harvard University Press

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• Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems ... reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature.

  Robert Wilson Lynd

  Men, Perfect, Able

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• Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable - not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.... You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent - you learn, in a word, femininity.

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Growing Up, Pain, Father

  "Only Words". Book by Catharine MacKinnon, 1993.

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• It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?

  Jeff VanderMeer

  World, Born, Tension

  Jeff Vandermeer (2007). “City of Saints and Madmen”, p.261, Spectra

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• Of all the many and (thanks to a free press) the ever-multiplying blessings attendant upon the "glorious constitution" of literature, not the least precious and profitable to a modern cultivator of systems and syllables, in pamphlets, magazines, and folios, is the right of Quotation.

  Samuel Laman Blanchard

  Blessing, Magazines, Thanks

  "Sketches from Life, Parts 1-2" by Laman Blanchard, 1846.

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• We have devoted ourselves to the government and extension of the Church, and, among other objects, we have conceived it to be our duty to foster especially literature and the fine arts ... next to knowledge and true worship of the Creator, nothing is better or more useful to mankind than such studies.

  Pope Leo X

  Art, Government, Church

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• This used to be about sex. The literature of my people was pornography, filled with cries for mercy, drama enacted on people without prolonged negotiation, partners engaged in a dance in the middle of a bonfire. Now, it's 300-page manuals about how to make sure nothing bad will happen.

  Laura Antoniou

  Sex, Drama, People

  "Unsafe at Any Speed or: Safe, Sane and Consensual, My Fanny". Pucker Up (puckerup.com), Issue 1, p. 12, Winter 1995.

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• [Vathek] has, in parts, been called, but to some judgments, never is, dull: it is certainly in parts, grotesque, extravagant and even nasty. But Beckford could plead sufficient "local colour" for it, and a contrast, again almost Shakespearean, between the flickering farce atrocities of the beginning and the sombre magnificence of the end. Beckford's claims, in fact, rest on the half-score or even half-dozen pages towards the end: but these pages are hard to parallel in the later literature of prose fiction.

  William Thomas Beckford

  Fiction, Half, Dozen

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• So many people's school experience contains at least one instance of being looked down upon because they didn't care for one or more of the sacred mutant outcroppings of High Modernism, and they concluded from this that Literature is all about impenetrable stuff that they don't like. That damn Hemingway with his crazy free verse.

  Patrick Nielsen Hayden

  Crazy, School, People

  "Oh No Lev Grossman No". nielsenhayden.com. August 30, 2009.

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• Our point isn't to make an examination of popular film but to illustrate that the yearning for a heroic adventure lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness; film, television, literature, sports, and travel are in a sense vicarious adventures.

  Alan Hirsch

  Sports, Lying, Adventure

  Michael Frost, Alan Hirsch (2011). “The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage”, p.110, Baker Books

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• The history of the Bible text is a romance of literature, though it is a romance of which the consequences are of vital import; and thanks to the succession of discoveries which have been made of late years, we know more about it than of the history of any other ancient book in the world.

  Frederic G. Kenyon

  Book, Discovery, Years

  "The Story Of The Bible" by Frederic G. Kenyon. Ch. I, The Bible And Recent Discoveries, p. 4, 1949.

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• Seldom can two such epoch-making events have occurred in successive years as happened then. In 1453 the Turks stormed Constantinople and finally destroyed the Greek Empire, driving out Greek scholars, who carried the knowledge of Greek language and literature to the western world; and in 1454 the first document known to us appeared from the printing press at Mainz.

  Frederic G. Kenyon

  Two, Years, Greek

  "The Story Of The Bible" by Frederic G. Kenyon. Ch. IV, From manuscript To Print, p. 41-42, 1949.

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• The apostles were scattered, and even the leaders of the Church in Jerusalem had neither the power nor the means to impose uniformity.In these circumstances, we must imagine the literature of Christianity as spreading gradually, irregularly, and in a manner which variations inevitable.

  Frederic G. Kenyon

  Mean, Leader, Church

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• The Gospels were not thought of as works of literature. People were not concerned with the literary reputation of Matthew or Mark, but with the substance of their records of our Lord's life. They did not have to respect their actual words, as they would if they were transcribing the works of Thucydides or Plato.

  Frederic G. Kenyon

  Plato, People, Substance

  "The Story Of The Bible" by Frederic G. Kenyon. Ch. X, The Position Today, p. 135, 1949.

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