Quotes About Literature

We fall asleep on words / we wake among words

Basing his work on F.R. Leavis's (1895–1978) ideas on literary criticism, Hoggart argued that a critical reading of art could reveal "the felt quality of life" of a society. Only art could recreate life in all its rich complexity and diversity.

I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on.

This use of the vernacular became the fundamental framework for all but one of her novels and is particularly effective in her classic work Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, which is more closely related to Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and Jean Toomer's Cane than to Langston Hughes's and Richard Wright's proletarian literature, so popular in the Depression.

Their Eyes is a bold feminist novel, the first to be explicitly so in the Afro-American tradition.

It is this urge that resonates in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Beloved, and in Walker's depiction of Hurston as our prime symbol of "racial health—a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.

More people have read Hurston's works since 1975 than did between that date and the publication of her first novel

Though attacked by Wright and virtually ignored by his literary heirs, Hurston's ideas about language and craft undergird many of the most successful contributions to Afro-American literature that followed.

These two "speech communities," as it were, are Hurston's great sources of inspiration not only in her novels but also in her autobiography.

she constantly shifts back and forth between her "literate" narrator's voice and a highly idiomatic black voice

The Estate of Zora Neale Hurston would like to thank those people who have worked so hard over the years in introducing new generations of readers to the work of Zora Neale Hurston. We are indebted to Robert Hemenway, Alice Walker, and all the Modern Language Association folks who helped usher in Zora's rediscovery.

While I was in the research field in 1929, the idea of Jonah's Gourd Vine came to me. I had written a few short stories, but the idea of attempting a book seemed so big that I gazed at it in the quiet of the night, but hid it away from even myself in daylight.

Alice Walker published her important essay ("In Search of Zora Neale Hurston") in Ms. magazine in 1975

If Wright, Ellison, Brown, and Hurston were engaged in a battle over ideal fictional modes with which to represent the Negro, clearly Hurston lost the battle. But not the war.

Here, finally, was a woman on a quest for her own identity and, unlike so many other questing figures in black literature, her journey would take her, not away from, but deeper and deeper into blackness, the descent into the Everglades with its rich black soil, wild cane, and communal life representing immersion into black traditions.

How could the recipient of two Guggenheims and the author of four novels, a dozen short stories, two musicals, two books on black mythology, dozens of essays, and a prizewinning autobiography virtually 'disappear' from her readership for three full decades?

I'm not an academic, but I've always loved poetry since I've been small.

My parents were bookish, very musical, but otherwise uninvolved in the arts or the academic world.

A book can be wonderful and powerful and accessible and artful all at the same time.

It's really hard to be a story writer - no matter how much acclaim you get - and not write a novel.

Literature births activists.

Reading is, hands-down, my favorite activity.

I've read only fiction, so I don't know anything actual.

Sometimes I get to see a movie that's adapted from a book that I haven't heard about or that I love the movie so much that I will, of course, read the book.