Literature Quotes - Page 141

Rhetoric takes no real account of the art in literature and morality takes no account of the art in life.

National literature begins with fables and ends with novels.

When Thomas Mann arrived in California from Germany, they asked him about German literature. And he said, 'German literature is where I am.' It's really a bit grand, but if a German can afford it, I can afford it.

Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent-better yet, the infinite-against the temporary, against the finite.

In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony.

The woman that deliberates is lost.

I've always said that music is like literature.

For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.

In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.

All literature, is, finally autobiographical.

Critics are the eunuchs of literature. They stand by in envious awe while the whole man and his partner demonstrate the art of living.

Ever'body's askin' that. "What we comin' to?" Seems to me we don't never come to nothin'. Always on the way.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

To do your own work well, whether it be for life or death.

Maxims and aphorisms, let us remember that wisdom is the true salt of literature, and the books that are most nourishing are richly stored with it, and that is the main object to seek in reading books.

Americans believe that if you know something, you should do something about it.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

The longing we have to communicate cleanly and directly with people is always obstructed by qualifications and often with concern about how our messages will be received.

The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.

The study of science, dissociated from that of philosophy and literature, narrows the mind and weakens the power to love and follow the noblest ideals: for the truths which science ignores and must ignore are precisely those which have the deepest bearing on life and conduct.

For me, the measure of a poem is the word, not the line.

[Alfred] Hitchcock was very interested in the image on the screen.As is any good cinema director. That is the language they speak. It is not literature, it is images on screen.

I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.