World Literature Quotes

• Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

  C. S. Lewis

  Respect, Book, Healing

  31 Copy quote

• Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Reality, Doe, Add

  14 Copy quote

• National literature does not mean much these days; now is the age of world literature, and every one must contribute to hasten thearrival of that age.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Mean, Age, Doe

  5 Copy quote

• Literature is the question minus the answer.

  Roland Barthes

  Art, Healing, Poetry

  34 Copy quote

• But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

  Aldous Huxley

  Real, Hipster, Brave New World

  Aldous Huxley (1950). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Brave new world”

  93 Copy quote

  Show source

• That love is a conflict seems to me obvious and natural. There isn't a single worthwhile work in world literature based on love that is only about the conquest of happiness, the effort to arrive at what we call love. It's the struggle that has always interested those who produce works of art - literature, cinema or poetry.

  Michelangelo Antonioni

  Art, Struggle, Love Is

  Source: scrapsfromtheloft.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.

  Edward Abbey

  Philosophy, Buddhism, Common Sense

  Edward Abbey (2006). “Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• All third world literature is about nation, that identity is the fundamental literary problem in the third world. The writer's identity is insecure because the nation's identity is not secure. The nation doesn't provide the third world writer with a secure identity, because the nation is colonized, it's oppressed, it's part of somebody else's empire.

  Mark McMorris

  Insecure, Identity, Empires

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• My works are Chinese literature, which is part of world literature. They show the life of Chinese people as well as the country's unique culture and folk customs.

  Mo Yan

  Country, Unique, People

  "Nobel winner Mo Yan speaks up for jailed 'subversive' Liu Xiaobo" by Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. October 12, 2012.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.

  Edward Abbey

  Museums, Pay, Professors

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.36, RosettaBooks

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I read world literature and I read French romances in the originals. I had quite a profound knowledge - no, that sounds conceited, but I did have a profound interest in everything spiritual.

  Baldur von Schirach

  Spiritual, Conceited, Profound

  "The Nuremberg Interviews". Book by Leon Goldensohn, 2004.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.

  James Buchan

  Country, Dog, Men

  "Lifting the veil" by James Buchan, www.theguardian.com. November 12, 2004.

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.

  Edward Abbey

  Cowboy, Certain, Obligation

  4 Copy quote

• The Astonishment Tapes will now take its place within the growing field of international research about postwar American poetry's important contribution to world literature. Miriam Nichols has once again done exceptional scholarship.

  Peter Gizzi

  Important, Astonishment, Fields

  4 Copy quote