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"It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein."
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Exlpore more Literature quotes
"Some books sold because they are (said to be) great. Some are (said to be) great because they sold."
"The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose."
"Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose."
"My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose."
"This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power."
"The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have."
"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
"No, said Bran. "I haven't. And if I have it doesn't matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she'd told before, but we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time."
"Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over."
"Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
Explore more quotes by Raymond Queneau
"The Odyssey is the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established, and even so it is detached from the historical side."
"There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions."
"One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey."
"We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life."
"The Odyssey is the story of someone who, in the course of diverse experiences, acquires a personality or affirms and recovers his personality."
"Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything."
"To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a technical refinement."
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