literature quotes

• The crown of literature is poetry. (William Maugham) [literature/poetry]
• In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others. (Andre Maurois) [literature/love]
• 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. (Roland Barthes) [literature]
• All literature is political. (LeVar Burton) [literature]
• The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary. (Italo Calvino) [literature/language/literature]
• All literature is gossip. (Truman Capote) [literature]
• There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write. (Thomas Carlyle) [literature/men]
• When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball. (Raymond Chandler) [literature/matter/literary style/situation]
• An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence. (Raymond Chandler) [age/poetry/literature]
• The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called significant literature will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles. (Raymond Chandler) [reading/literature/willpower]
• Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration. () [source/literature/people/inspiration]
• I believe no satirist could breathe this air. If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us tomorrow, he would be hunted down. If you have any knowledge of our literature, and can give me the name of any man, American born and bred, who has anatomized our follies as a people, and not as this or that party; and who has escaped the foulest and most brutal slander, the most inveterate hatred and intolerant pursuit; it will be a strange name in my ears, believe me. (Charles Dickens) [knowledge/literature/give/people]
• Critics are those who have failed in literature and art. (Benjamin Disraeli) [literature/art]
• I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate. (Marguerite Duras) [literature]
• I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of literature and speech and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear. (George Eliot) [silence/literature/speech/take]
• Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature. (Ralph Waldo Emerson) [high/respect/literature]
• The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) [literature]
• The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it. (Vaclav Havel) [attempt/literature/thing/literature]
• How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him. (Ernest Hemingway) [literature/writers/past/past]
• All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since. (Ernest Hemingway) [literature]
• Though dissenters seem to question everything in sight, they are actually bundles of dusty answers and never conceived a new question. What offends us most in the literature of dissent is the lack of hesitation and wonder. (Eric Hoffer) [question/question/literature/wonder]
• The great British Library --an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or pure English, undefiled wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought. (Washington Irving) [library/collection/literature/english]
• It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. (Henry James) [literature]
• A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man. (Samuel Johnson) [business/literature]
• Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. (Helen Keller) [literature]
• Literature is analysis after the event. (Doris Lessing) [literature]
• Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead. (Sinclair Lewis) [literature/cold]
• In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman. (Sinclair Lewis) [countries/art/literature/america]
• No literature is complete until the language it was written in is dead. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) [literature/language]
• In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people. (Andre Maurois) [literature/love/choice/people]
• All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers. (Carson McCullers) [men/disease/literature/quality]

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