Literature Quotes - Page 4

• Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

  Ezra Pound

  Inspirational, Hygiene, Degrees

  How to Read pt. 2 (1931)

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• If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.

  W. H. Auden

  Art, Book, Men

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• The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

  Sarah Orne Jewett

  Years, Hygiene, Mind

  Sarah Orne Jewett (1997). “The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories”, p.33, UPNE

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• In the electronic age, books, words and reading are not likely to remain sufficiently authoritative and central to knowledge to justify literature.

  Bill Vaughan

  Book, Reading, Age

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• A people's literature is the great text-book for real knowledge of them.

  Edith Hamilton

  Real, Book, People

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

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• The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

  Jean Cocteau

  Order, Masterpiece, Dictionary

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• There is first the literature of knowledge, and secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is--to teach; the function of the second is--to move, the first is a rudder, the second an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy.

  Thomas de Quincey

  Moving, Understanding, May

  Thomas De Quincey (1873). “Leaders in literature”, p.5

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• There are those who believe that the value of a children's book can be measured only in terms of the moral lessons it tries to impose or the perfect role models it offers. Personally, I happen to think that a book is of extraordinary value if it gives the reader nothing more than a smile or two. In fact, I happen to think that's huge.

  Barbara Park

  Smile, Children, Fun

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• When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature.

  Raymond Chandler

  Book, Artistic, Intensity

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.51, Univ of California Press

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• The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the '60s: Independent fire!

  Gwendolyn Brooks

  Sweet, Flower, Independent

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• How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Marriage, Sweet Love, Educational

  Sonnets from the Portuguese no. 43 (1850)

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• I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

  Ralph Ellison

  People, Black History, African American

  Invisible Man prologue (1952)

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• A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.

  Christopher Hampton

  Art, Disappointment, Numbers

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• The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and ... often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.

  Vaclav Havel

  Hygiene, Suffering, Deceptive

  "Disturbing the Peace". Book by Vaclav Havel, 1986.

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• For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

  Games, Pages, Mental Health

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• What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

  Henry Miller

  Streets

  Henry Miller (2007). “Black Spring”, p.3, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

  Ezra Pound

  Art, Curiosity, Letters

  "A Serious Character". Book by Humphrey Carpenter, 1988.

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• Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

  Wallace Stevens

  Inappropriate, Source, British

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose”, p.256, Vintage

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• I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

  Edith Wharton

  Views, Political, Good Enough

  Edith Wharton, Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis, Nancy Lewis (1988). “The letters of Edith Wharton”, Macmillan Reference USA

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• Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Men, Others Opinions

  A Room of One's Own (1929) ch. 3

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• Jim said that bees won't sting idiots, but I didn't believe that, because I tried them lots of times myself and they wouldn't sting me.

  Mark Twain

  Believe, Bees, Idiot

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• While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

  Cyril Connolly

  Alive

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• The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.

  George Orwell

  Art, Book, Facts

  George Orwell (1968). “The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: In front of your nose, 1945-1950”

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• Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

  Samuel Butler

  Inspirational, Motivational, Music

  Samuel Butler (2016). “The Way of All Flesh”, p.57, Samuel Butler

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• All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Book, Usa, Modern

  Green Hills of Africa ch. 1 (1935)

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