Quotes About Literature

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it. –

Energy was the ruling theme of Victorian science, as machines increasingly harnessed the forces of nature to do man's work. The concept is also present in the art and literature of the age, notably in the poems of William Blake. The Romantic movement was much interested in energy and its various transformations.

Courses in historiography confront students with the possibility that history, like literature, is about stories and that it necessarily involves philosophical questions, such as how we can actually come to know things.

The literary text seems like "a fortified medieval town –foreigners and outsiders are repelled, or allowed in only after rigorous checks, but within all is bustling life; exchange, mutual interdependence and influence are the rule.

In the end, yes, it is a famous bookstore and, yes, it is of no small literary importance. But more than anything, Shakespeare and Company is a refuge, like the church across the river. A place where the owner allows everyone to take what they need and give what they can.

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

students ingested mountains of facts and arithmetic, but were bereft of analytic ability and utterly incapable of understanding sophisticated prose or poetry. They were taught not to reason but to cram.

Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame.

But [Ben Marcus] can't resist the urge to re-enact the great prizefights of the past--Kerouac vs. Capote, Barth vs. Gardner--as if what we really need, in 2005, is two white male writers fighting over something that can't be circumscribed, much less owned. Isn't it time we allowed the scorched-earth rhetoric of avant-gardes and ancien régimes to drift, like the tissue-thin sheets of an old aerogramme, into the dustbin of history?

Roth wrote The Breast . Would you ask him how he could do this since he had never been a breast? Adams wrote Watership Down . Would you ask him how he could do this since he admitted his rabbit knowledge came from a book about rabbits? ... And those hobbits!... I am a bigger risk-taker than these others. The Hoosiers can contradict me. No rabbit, hobbit, or breast has been known to speak up in reply to their exploiters.

Thomas Sowell asserts that by the late 1960's, black men from families with a library card, magazines and other literature in the home reached high-level occupations as often as white males of similar backgrounds.

One guy at a Rubber Tramp Rendezvous campfire was horrified to learn I hadn't yet read Travels with Charley; the next day he arrived at the van to lend me a paperback. Other entries in the literary canon of this subculture included Blue Highways by William Least Heat- Moon, Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, and Wild by Cheryl Strayed.

author Agatha Christie was knowledgeable

she was self-educated, like the great majority of women writers once were (including Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf)—haphazardly but effectively.

From May 1717 to April 1718, Voltaire sat comfortably in the infamous prison insulting the Regent and reading Homer.

I hear what many of you are saying: We don't have the time, we are busy. Well Nobody Has Time, Everyone Is Busy. In the time it took you to read this post, your life just got a minute shorter. That is precisely why we read (and why some of us write): because life is short and finite, we want more, and literature is the distillation of all those lives we will not lead.

Once you've read too many trashy best-sellers, you begin to look for something with substance, something that attempts to define the universe.

This is not what death should be. Death, the reason for religion, the subject of great literature, the certainty we spend our lives warding off, the giant mystery that looms over everything we do, death should be spectacular, not pity-inducing, a bang and not a whimper. A huge ball of fire, a shower of sparks, a final charge into the ranks of your enemies, a terrific explosion, a backward dive into the fiery pit. Not. . .this.

Vielleicht liest er zu viel. Das soll sehr schädlich sein.

Er war nicht töricht genug, nicht an Zufälle zu glauben. Keine Zufälle gab es nur in guter Literatur – das Leben war täglich voll der albernsten.

But Anya, you're not any girl, you are someone very special. You have a gift of happiness that's almost magical. To Anya the gentle fluttering of new life within reminded her that Adam had not only been there in Stockholm but would remain with her forever. It is completely possible. Idiopathic reversals of ovarian failure are well documented in the literature.

Only Poe could have dreamed the rest.

On May 10, 1933, the Nazi Party burned unwelcome books—Einstein, Freud, the brothers Mann, and many others—in great pyres throughout Germany, but seven days later Hitler declared himself committed to peace and went so far as to pledge complete disarmament if other countries followed suit. The world swooned with relief.

following my between-books strategy of reading voraciously and promiscuously. What