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Literature Quotes
"The object of Literature is to instruct, to animate, or to amuse."
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"No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid."
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"A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins."
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"Posterity makes the judgments. There are going to be a lot of surprises in store for everybody."
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"There are, it is true, at present no great prizes in literature such as are offered by the learned professions, but there are quite as many small ones - competences; while, on the other hand, it is not so much of a lottery."
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"In America, we have the feeling of the doomed young artist. Fitzgerald was the great example of that."
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"I've been missing Japanese literature so much of late."
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"Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar."
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"The fact that at the moment the distinction is being made, a young adult, as opposed to an adult, is the one reading it. In other words, I don't entirely believe in the distinction. A great book is a great book, and it's impossible to say what part of a person is going to connect to it."
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"Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here."
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"When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all."
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"There is in Albert Camus' literary craftsmanship a seductive intelligence that could almost make a reader dismiss his philosophical intentions if he had not insisted on making them so clear."
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"Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep."
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"Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover."
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"A book, a real book, language incarnate, becomes a part of one's bodily life."
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"Book should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don't you agree?"
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"There is the outside of a story, and the inside of a story... One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed."
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"A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?"
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"Think you if Laura had been Petrarch's wife He would have written sonnets all his life?"
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"I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books--whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives."
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"While the goal of a book is to create a positive emotional experience for the reader, the goal of the opening is to set the stage, to pull the reader in."
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"Paul was terribly personal. The books I like are the ones that make you feel like you are with a person who is being quite vulnerable, telling you all sorts of stuff that is personal, and that's the thing Paul did that makes me like him."
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"You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?"
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"Lastly, literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist."
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"But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy."
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"My earliest, most impactful encounter with a book was when I was seven and awoke early on Christmas morning to find Roald Dahl's 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' in my stocking. I had never been so excited by the sight of a book - and have possibly never been since!"
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"People tell stories and it's up to those who listen whether to believe or not.""Shouldn't the storyteller believe it.""The storyteller should tell it."
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"In a novel, you'll find yourself in a world of possibilities. You'll find shelter there."
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"At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language."
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"Good fiction creates its own reality."
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"Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them."
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"Only in a novel are all things given full play."
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"I get it, even if Jamie can't put it into words. There are some books you can never get rid of, even if you don't like the ending."
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"And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."
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"By a route obscure and lonelyHaunted by ill angels only,Where an eidolon, named NIGHT,On a black throne reigns upright,I have reached these lands but newlyFrom an ultimate dim Thule --From a wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime,Out of SPACE, out of TIME."
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"Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate."
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"All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one."
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"The concept of industry domination of regulatory agencies was well known and documented in the literature by the 1960s."
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"I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing."
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"When I found the book was condemned as soon as the book was printed, or rather as soon as it was set up ready to print, I held it in plates for a year nearly, waiting to see what would come out of all this discussion."
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"Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem."
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"Maybe the world isn't enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language."
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"It's so wrong when I pick up a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and I look at the last page and it doesn't say, Yours truly, at the end."
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"Father Wolf looked on amazed. He had almost forgotten the days when he won Mother Wolf in fair fight from five other wolves, when she ran in the Pack and was not called The Demon for compliment's sake. Shere Khan might have faced Father Wolf, but he could not stand up against Mother Wolf, for he knew that where he was she had all the advantage of the ground, and would fight to the death. So he backed out of the cave mouth growling..."
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