Literature Quotes - Page 48

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.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.

All literature is gossip.

Literature, like memory, selects only the vivid patches.

The Victorians needed parody. Without it their literature would have been a rank and weedy growth, over-watered with tears.

In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.

To know that the Bible is the literature of a barbarous people, to know that it is uninspired, to be certain that the supernatural does not and cannot exist - all this is but the beginning of wisdom.

Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough for literature. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

Poetry depends on being simultaneously opaque and transparent. It can't be only one or the other. The pebble and the pool.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Nothing is more indispensable to true religiosity than a mediator that links us with divinity.

We never completely comprehend ourselves, but we can do far more than comprehend.

And cooking is about balance and harmony.

What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.

The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society

Just a little help, a small security force, a bit of food, can save lives

I have often tried to tell the story of a place through people there.

We cannot attribute to fortune or virtue that which is achieved without either.

I don't know if proud is the right word, but I am somebody who does not, on the whole, have the highest regard for my own stuff in that when I look all I get to see are the flaws.

If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

There are very few heroines in literature who have defined their lives morally rather than romantically and likewise but a handful in film.

When literature exists, perhaps we do not notice how important it is, but when it does not exist, our lives become coarsened and brutal. For this reason, I am proud of my profession, but also aware of its importance.

I read Russian literature a lot.