Literature Quotes - Page 56

For a murderous blow let murderous blow atone.

The words of truth are simple.

Death is easier than a wretched life; and better never to have born than to live and fare badly.

The wisest of the wise may err.

Thus if the First Amendment means anything in this field, it must allow protests even against the moral code that the standard of the day sets for the community. In other words, literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.

Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.

Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.

I am interested in things happening around me, and I need to understand what's going on in other artistic sectors like music and literature.

In literature, the ghost is almost always a metaphor for the weight of the past. I don't believe in them in the traditional sense.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination.

The demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature.

Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.

Postmodernism cost literature its audience.

The test of real literature is that it will bear repetition. We read over the same pages again and again, and always with fresh delight.

The only books that work are those which fly through the air - the ones you let happen, not make happen.

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.

One of my major preoccupations is the approximation between what I say and what I do, between what I seem to be and what I am actually becoming.

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.

The best way to make a silk purse from a sow's ear is to begin with a silk sow. The same is true of money.

Decreased business base increases overhead. So does increased business base.