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"Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility."
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Exlpore more Literature quotes
"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."
"There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be."
"Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction."
"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."
"These fragments I have shored against my ruins."
"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."
"Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince."
"In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself."
"It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then."
"Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon."
Explore more quotes by Wallace Stevens
"How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture."
"It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom."
"Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires."
"To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind."
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