"My share of the work may be limited, but the fact that it is work makes it precious."
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Literature quotes
Literature
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Literature quotes (page 51 of 201)
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"The mouse that hath but one hole is quickly taken."
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"Speak not of my debts unless you mean to pay them."
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"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."
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"The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling."
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"If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?"
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"War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil."
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"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."
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"I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man."
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"The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration."
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"I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead."
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"Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men."
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"The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations."
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"The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in."
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"Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom."
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"Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living."
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"I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests."
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"The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite."
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"How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world."
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"In a certain sense the Good is comfortless."
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