Quotes About Literature

That gesture was intended as, in itself, a political act. And the editors were not simply proposing that modernist art and literature could be appreciated regardless of one's politics; they were committed to explaining why an appreciation for modernism was consistent with political progressivism.

Dreiser's literary faults, it gives us to understand, are essentially social and political virtues.

The Partisan case was advanced as well by Trilling's insistence that what commends modernist writing to progressive readers is, precisely, the challenge it often makes to progressive belief: "The contemporary authors we most wish to read and most wish to admire for their literary qualities demand of us a great agility and ingenuity in coping with their antagonism to our social and political ideals.

Even in The Liberal Imagination, a book with a clear polemical purpose, ambivalence about the educative value of literature lurks in the background of many of the essays.

Or again, exegesis of The Waste Land often reads remarkably like the psychoanalytic interpretation of a dream, yet we know that Eliot's methods were prepared for him not by Freud but by other poets.

I thoroughly believe that reading and literature can help a society to better understand itself.

Literature is the expression of society.

There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.

Not literature alone, but society itself is wormed and rotten when language ceases to be respected not merely by advertisers and politicians, but by persons of learning and authority.

Literature should be a kind of revolutionary manifesto against established morality and established society.

It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet

Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.

An artist should be well read in the best books, and thoroughly high bred, both in heart and bearing. In a word, he should be fit for the best society, and should keef out of it.

People are more concerned about the economy then these ridiculous concerns as to gender inequity in society, as manifested in marriages, in the mental health system, and then in literature.

for me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society.

Only in today's sick society can a man be persecuted for reading too many books.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

The first forms of writing emerged not for art, literature, or love, not for spiritual or liturgical purposes, but for business--all literature could be said to originate from sales receipts (sorry).

I read world literature and I read French romances in the originals. I had quite a profound knowledge - no, that sounds conceited, but I did have a profound interest in everything spiritual.

bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.

I'm a reader and a storyteller, and God chose literature and story and poetry as the languages of my spiritual text. To me, the Bible is a manifesto, a guide, a love letter, a story.

You never seem to hear about psychic occult attack in spiritual literature. This knowledge has been conveniently forgotten.