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Motivational Quotes

Literature

The truth is that literature, particularly fiction, is not the pure medium we sometimes assume it to be. Response to it is affected by things other than its own intrinsic quality; by a curiosity or lack of it about the people it deals with, their outlook, their way of life.
- Palmer, Vance
Literature Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Literature

1.
All literature is gossip.
Capote, Truman

2.
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
Lewis, Sinclair

3.
The only privilege literature deserves -- and this privilege it requires in order to exist -- is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.
Rushdie, Salman

4.
If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.
Sartre, Jean-Paul

5.
As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
Stevens, Wallace

6.
Literature is analysis after the event.
Lessing, Doris

7.
A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.
Moore, George

8.
Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

9.
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Pound, Ezra

10.
I am not a literary man. I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.
Murray, Jim

11.
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!
Lawrence, D. H.

12.
Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing -- he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.
Trilling, Lionel

13.
One learns little more about a man from his feats of literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.
Colby, Frank Moore

14.
Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers -- such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a fa?ade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

15.
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.
Auden, W. H.

16.
Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
Sontag, Susan

17.
Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
Trilling, Lionel

18.
Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.
Man, Paul De

19.
In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.
Frye, Northrop

20.
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
Rushdie, Salman

21.
There can be no literary equivalent to truth.
Riding, Laura

22.
Just as the office worker dreams of murdering his hated boss and so is saved from really murdering him, so it is with the author; with his great dreams he helps his readers to survive, to avoid their worst intentions. And society, without realizing it respects and even exalts him, albeit with a kind of jealousy, fear and even repulsion, since few people want to discover the horrors that lurk in the depths of their souls. This is the highest mission of great literature, and there is no other.
Sabato, Ernesto

23.
I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.
Havel, Vaclav

24.
In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people.
Maurois, Andre

25.
Literature, as a field of glory, is an arena where a tomb may be more easily found than laurels; and as a means of support, it is the chance of chances.
Giles, Henry

26.
The party of God and the party of Literature have more in common than either will admit; their texts may conflict, but their bigotries coincide. Both insist on being the sole custodians of the true word and its only interpreters.
Raphael, Frederic

27.
Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that
Woolf, Virginia

28.
Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.
Ford, Ford Madox

29.
Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge -- they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.
Belinsky, Vissarion

30.
All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently . Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.
Hemingway, Ernest

31.
Remarks are not literature.
Stein, Gertrude

32.
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
Calvino, Italo

33.
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
Kundera, Milan

34.
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
Keller, Helen

35.
The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.
Rushdie, Salman

36.
Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.
Paz, Octavio

37.
The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.
Mallarme, Stephane

38.
If you look at history you'll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.
Erasmus, Desiderius

39.
The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.
Literature flourishes best when it is half trade and half an art.
Inge, Dean William R.

41.
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
Stevens, Wallace

42.
The truth is that literature, particularly fiction, is not the pure medium we sometimes assume it to be. Response to it is affected by things other than its own intrinsic quality; by a curiosity or lack of it about the people it deals with, their outlook, their way of life.
Palmer, Vance

43.
English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.
Butler, Marilyn

44.
Literature is the immortality of speech.
Schlegel, August Wilhelm Von

45.
When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign -- a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.
Calvino, Italo

46.
What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.
Miller, Henry

47.
To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.
Fischer, Ernst

48.
Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.
James, P. D.

49.
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
Hampton, Christopher

50.
It is a good lesson --though it may often be a hard one --for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel


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