"Poetry surprises us with what we already know."
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Literature quotes
Literature
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Literature quotes (page 75 of 201)
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"Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Ever'body's askin' that. "What we comin' to?" Seems to me we don't never come to nothin'. Always on the way."
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"Critics are the eunuchs of literature. They stand by in envious awe while the whole man and his partner demonstrate the art of living."
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"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."
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"Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life."
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"For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end."
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"All literature, is, finally autobiographical."
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"National literature begins with fables and ends with novels."
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"The greatest works of literature seem to embody both "art" and "morality"."
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"Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable."
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"Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time."
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"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."
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"In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony."
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"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."
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"To do your own work well, whether it be for life or death."
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"All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby."
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"I have made as much out of myself as could be made of the stuff, and no man should require more."
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