Literature Quotes

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
Ezra Pound

Nation, Decays, Declines

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
Ezra Pound

Age, Great, Perhaps

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
Ezra Pound

Social, Ability, Exist

One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer.
Caroline Kennedy

Love, Mother, Greatest

I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.
John le Carre

Language, Ask, Early

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
John le Carre

Education, Made, German

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace Stevens

Nothing, American, Since

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
Wallace Stevens

Life, Terrible, Grows

The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition.
Naguib Mahfouz

Won, Deserve, Consider

When I was at school, I was terrible at algebra and arithmetic, but I was always the best at English and literature. And acting, of course.
Joan Collins

Best, School, Acting

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.
Jorge Luis Borges

Others, Act, Order

When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself, we reach dramatic literature.
George P. Baker

Human, Play, Makes

I have a lot of feminist idols. My favorite thing about growing up in Arkansas - well, not favorite but something I've always felt grateful for - was that I really had to dig for what I could. There was no Internet. There wasn't tons of feminist literature floating around.
Beth Ditto

Around, Grateful, Growing

With literature, sometimes a book is presented in the media as being say, a Muslim story or an African story, when essentially it's a universal story which we can all relate to it, no matter what race or social background we come from.
Shawn Johnson

Book, Sometimes, Matter

The world of science and the world of literature have much in common. Each is an international club, helping to tie mankind together across barriers of nationality, race and language. I have been doubly lucky, being accepted as a member of both.
Freeman Dyson

Science, Together, Both

My dad's side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There's an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It's very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It's very warm, it's very up, it's very down. I would celebrate that.
Nick Clegg

Music, Family, Art

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
Lawrence Clark Powell

Strength, Creative, Vision

English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.
Lytton Strachey

Mind, Almost, Value

If American literature has a few heroes, Miller is one of them. He refused to name names at the McCarthy hearings, and his play 'The Crucible' analysed the hearings in the context of a previous American mass psychosis, the Salem witch trials.
Jane Smiley

Play, Trials, American

Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.
Jane Smiley

Life, School, Often

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
Raymond Chandler

Age, Poetry, Except

Like most kids growing up, I had a very wide interest. I was interested in everything. I tried to take advantage of everything, from the sciences to music to writing to literature.
Michael P. Anderson

Music, Writing, Everything

Even before Europe was united in an economic level or was conceived at the level of economic interests and trade, it was culture that united all the countries of Europe. The arts, literature, music are the connecting link of Europe.
Dario Fo

Music, Before, Culture

Holden Caulfield is the best character in literature, period.
Josh Hutcherson

Best, Character, Period

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.
Annie Dillard

Write, Writer, Studies

The writer studies literature, not the world.
Annie Dillard

Writer, Studies

Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer.
Jose Saramago

Time, Job, Find

The object of Literature is to instruct, to animate, or to amuse.
George Henry Lewes

Object, Amuse, Animate

It is unhappily true that much insincere Literature and Art, executed solely with a view to effect, does succeed by deceiving the public.
George Henry Lewes

Art, True, Succeed

We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day.
Howard Nemerov

Love, Time, Teach

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