Literature Quotes - Page 51

Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.

The great thing about literature is that you're making up your own interpretation of the character anyway. Also, you're given basically a bible of who a character is and you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot if you're not reading it.

Above all be of single aim; have a legitimate and useful purpose, and devote yourself unreservedly to it.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.

Whether there is such a thing as Reality, of which the various levels are only partial aspects, or whether there are only levels, is something that literature cannot decide. Literature recognizes rather the *reality of the levels.*

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.

Usually the modest person passes for someone reserved, the silent for a sullen person

Lovers have a way of using this word "nothing" which implies exactly the opposite.

How vain, without the merit, is the name.

Justice prevails over transgression when she comes to the end of the race.

What's vice today may be virtue, tomorrow.

An unclean person is universally a slothful one.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

Every people have gods to suit their circumstances.

A man can become so accustomed to the thought of his own faults that he will begin to cherish them as charming little 'personal characteristics.'

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but less by assimilation than by friction.

Journalism students need to understand it and need a solid background in the liberal arts, in sociology, economics, literature and language, because they won't get it later on.

Human nature is above all things lazy.

The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.

A woman's health is her capital.

If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls.

It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.