Great Literature Quotes

All great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature. ~ Walter Mosley

In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself ... I see with a myriad of eyes,but it is still I who see. ~ C.S. Lewis

I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course – I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the Midwest to Leechfield, then spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother's front porch reading Homer (or Ovid or Virgil) and waiting for someone to ask me what I was reading. No one ever did. People asked me what I was drinking, how much I weighed, where I was living, and if I had married yet, but no one gave me a chance to deliver my lecture on Great Literature. ~ Mary Karr

Who says great literatue has to be written by men? Who says great literature has to be about scary, creepy stuff like adulterers being punished and black slaves breaking loose and giant whales eating people? Why can't literature just be stories about women? Refined, respectable women have just as much to say as ignorant black slaves or bloodthirsty Indians or mad white whaling captains. Why do we have to pretend those people's lives matter more than our own? ~ Anna Quindlen

I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic. ~ Rabih Alameddine

For the male who dominates and writes, or by writing dominates, the woman has always been portrayed with hostility from the earliest times. Let us not be deceived by angelic descriptions of women. On the contrary, precisely because great literature is dominated by sweet, gentle creatures, the world of satire - which is that of the popular imagination - continually demonizes the woman, from antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and up to modern times. ~ Umberto Eco

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth. ~ Margaret Atwood

The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced. The world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art. No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior. ~ James Weldon Johnson

I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature, ~ John Berryman

The most enduring stories in literature generally have some kind of crime at their center, whether it's the bloody butchery of 'Hamlet,' the lecherous misanthropes of Dickens or the lone gunman from 'The Great Gatsby.' ~ Karin Slaughter

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes ~ Harold Bloom

Suddenly, literature, politics, and analysis came together, and I began to think more inclusively about the emotional imprisonment of mind and spirit to which all human beings are heir. In the course of analytic time, it became apparent that -- with or without the burden of social justice -- the effort required to attain any semblance of inner freedom was extraordinary.

Great literature, I then realized, is a record not of the achievement, but of the effort. ~ Vivian Gornick

One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent. ~ Justin Cronin

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to Literature. ~ Sarah Orne Jewett

It seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamourous one in the fury of dissappointed love (see: Great Literature). ~ Julian Barnes

When you don't have, or feel that you don't have, an extra moment to read philosophy, history, or science, when great literature, plays, and novels are as foreign to you as hieroglyphics, do you have any cahnce of seeing your work, career, or life in a new light? You might be doing well in the race, but it's the same race essentially down the same track with the same opponents that may prove to be less than sufficient in enabling you to get those kinds of things done that you want to have completed. ~ Jeff Davidson

Great literature transcends its native land, but none that I know of ignores its soil. ~ J. Frank Dobie

After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. "In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the 'moved' character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it's communication. ~ William L. Stull

There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history. ~ Gilbert Murray

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal. ~ Francoise Sagan

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. ~ Ezra Pound

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Nevertheless, the potential and actual importance of fantastic literature lies in such psychic links: what appears to be the result of an overweening imagination, boldly and arbitrarily defying the laws of time, space and ordered causality, is closely connected with, and structured by, the categories of the subconscious, the inner impulses of man's nature. At first glance the scope of fantastic literature, free as it is from the restrictions of natural law, appears to be unlimited. A closer look, however, will show that a few dominant themes and motifs constantly recur: deals with the Devil; returns from the grave for revenge or atonement; invisible creatures; vampires; werewolves; golems; animated puppets or automatons; witchcraft and sorcery; human organs operating as separate entities, and so on. Fantastic literature is a kind of fiction that always leads us back to ourselves, however exotic the presentation; and the objects and events, however bizarre they seem, are simply externalizations of inner psychic states. This may often be mere mummery, but on occasion it seems to touch the heart in its inmost depths and become great literature. ~ Franz Rottensteiner

Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon. ~ Edith Wharton

Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings. ~ Russell Kirk

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one. ~ Charles J. Shields

There is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies at the center of our lives, in the marrow of our bones, and in the deep recesses of the soul. At the heart of all great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion lies the naming and analyzing of this desire. Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality . . . Augustine says: 'You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.' Spirituality is about what we do with our unrest. ~ Ronald Rolheiser

In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write? ~ Gao Xingjian

What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be the means of achieving the former. ~ Northrop Frye

What great literature does best is to show us those moments which make life worth living. ~ Marty Rubin

Great literature remains great when it says new things to new generations, and the loops of a knot quite nicely parallel the contours and convolutions of Carroll's plot anyway.What's more, he probably would have been delighted at how this whimsical branch of math invaded the real world and became crucial to understanding our biology. ~ Sam Kean

One of the great joys of my job is that you spend a huge amount of time investigating different areas of literature. ~ Stephen Daldry

It is only by introducing the young to great literature, drama and music, and to the excitement of great science that we open to them the possibilities that lie within the human spirit -- enable them to see visions and dream dreams. ~ Eric Anderson

I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great. ~ Ted Rall

[Great literature] lifts you out of the here and now and brings you closer to the angels. ~ Allison Burnett

Literature offers us a different way of seeing things. The reading of literature opens our eyes, offering us new perspectives on things that we can evaluate and adopt. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. . . . In reading great literature, I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.[94] ~ Alister E. McGrath

Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as "great literature" by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake. I note he has replaced Dr. Schweitzer in some homes. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

To me, characters are at the heart of great literature. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature. ~ Lev Grossman

Nothing better protects a human being against the stupidity of prejudice, racism, religious or political sectarianism, and exclusivist nationalism than this truth that invariably appears in great literature: that men and women of all nations and places are essentially equal, and only injustice sows among them discrimination, fear, and exploitation. ~ Mario Vargas-Llosa

I suppose it's true that most great television, literature, and other forms of high art (and basic cable) benefit from a little hindsight. 'M.A.S.H.' comes to mind. So does 'The Iliad.' ~ Kevin Bleyer

Great language and great literature do not survive long without each other ~ Lance Conrad

I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did. ~ Julie Walters

Inequality may linger in the world of material things, but great music, great literature, great art and the wonders of science are, and should be, open to all. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language. ~ James Earl Jones

Literature tried to open the universe, to increase, even if only slightly the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally to be. Great literature went to the edges of the known and pushed against the boundaries of language, form, and possibility, to make the world feel larger, wider, than before. Yet this was an age in which men and women were being pushed toward ever-narrower definitions of themselves, encouraged to call themselves just one thing, Serb or Croat or Israeli or Palestinian or Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Baha'i or Jew, and the narrower their identities became, the greater was the likelihood of conflict between them. Literature's view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness, bigotry, tribalism, cultism and war. There were plenty of people who didn't want the universe opened, who would, in fact, prefer it to be shut down quite a bit, and so when artists went to the frontier and pushed they often found powerful forces pushing back. And yet they did what they had to do, even at the price of their own ease, and sometimes their lives. ~ Salman Rushdie

Just as the office worker dreams of murdering his hated boss and so is saved from really murdering him, so it is with the author; with his great dreams he helps his readers to survive, to avoid their worst intentions. And society, without realizing it respects and even exalts him, albeit with a kind of jealousy, fear and even repulsion, since few people want to discover the horrors that lurk in the depths of their souls. This is the highest mission of great literature, and there is no other. ~ Ernesto Sabato

Great Literature is help for humans. It is medicine of the highest order. In a more aware culture, writers would be considered priests. And, in fact, I have approached writing in a distinctly priestess frame of mind. I know what The Color Purple can mean to people, women and men, who have no voice. Who believe they have few choices in life. It can open to them, to their view, the full abundance of this amazing journey we are all on. It can lift them into a new realization of their own power, beauty, love, courage. It is a book that unites the present with the past, therefore giving people a sense of history and of timelessness they might never achieve otherwise. And even were it not 'great' literature, it has the best interests of all of us humans at heart. That we grow, change, challenge, encourage, love fiercely in the awareness that real love can never be incorrect. ~ Alice Walker

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away. ~ Chinua Achebe

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. ~ George Saintsbury

There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and friendship. ~ Bertrand Russell

When you read great literature, you become a thousand men and yet still be yourself. ~ C.S. Lewis

The herbalist I met a few times - it was great - she gave me literature about the different processes that an herbalist would do to make medicines from certain herbs and things. ~ Caitriona Balfe

All great characters, great icons, in literature are a bit of a riddle, and that's the reason we go back to them over and over. ~ David Lagercrantz

I'm not writing great literature. I'm writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters. ~ Kathy Reichs

great literature is literature that speaks to deep, fundamental human truths and experience in a way that is relatable to the reader and that may provoke engagement or facilitate insight into these truths and experiences. If these truths and experiences are about breaches of the normal, then surely horror has a place in literature, and in facts may proffer deep engagement with the most profound aspects of our existence. Sometimes only horror can say what needs to be said. ~ Jacob M. Held

Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that? ~ Kurt Vonnegut

But the cultivation and expression of virtue (and vice) and the formation of conscience is not merely an individual act but also a communal one. In addition to shaping individual experience and character, great literature has a role in forming the communal conscience and public virtue. We can understand a great deal about culture - its strengths, its weakness, its blind spots, and its struggles - when we examine the literature it not only produces but reveres. ~ Karen Swallow Prior

Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor. ~ Isaac D'Israeli

This is the thing about great literature. It reads like truth and sticks to you forever and lets you know that you are not alone. ~ Arlaina Tibensky

I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point. ~ Daniel Suarez

Ultimately, I want a peak experience in reading, and that is sometimes difficult to find in contemporary fiction. I'm not interested in books that are just clever and well executed; polish doesn't impress me, and I don't care about a merely capable sentence. Life is short; I want a confrontation with high art. I want soul. Great literature rattles the mind and makes the body sing. It's an unmistakable, electric feeling, and too rare. That is what I want. ~ C.E. Morgan

And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature. ~ Jerry Pournelle

We knew from our reading of great literature that Love involved Suffering, and would happily have got in some practice at Suffering if there was an implicit, perhaps even logical, promise that Love might be on its way. ~ Julian Barnes

A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation ~ H.L. Mencken

I'm a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I've had great difficulty getting my work published in China; very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given. ~ Salman Rushdie

I am an admirer of haiku, and I'm a great admirer of Japanese literature in general. ~ Richard Flanagan

Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted. ~ Robert Benchley

Great literature, obviously, could not rescue anyone from so grievous a fore-shortening of perspective. It was naïve and false on my part to think that the stu-dents would be rescued by Western classics. I knew perfectly well that great books work on our souls only over time, as they are mixed with experience and transformed by memory and desire and many other books, great and small. At some time later, the perception of a 'choice between freedom and sex' would dis-solve into absurdity. But for a while, the idea worked its mischief. ~ David Denby

The great universal literature has always had a tragic relation with freedom. The Greeks renounced absolute freedom and imposed order on chaotic mythology, like a tyrant. ~ Ismail Kadare

I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works. ~ Harold Bloom

What happened to the classics?" you may ask. "Don't you believe in reading great literature to children?"
Nothing happened to the classics-but something happened to children: their imaginations went to sleep in front of the television set twenty-five years ago. Reading a classic to a child whose imagination is in a state of retarded development will not foster a love of literature in that child. ~ Jim Trelease

I doubt if anything learnt at school is of more value than great literature learnt by heart. ~ Richard Livingstone

The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great. ~ Doris Lessing

They should have a store next to the bookstore called the shit store where you can get shit books to read while on the shitter. No one reads great literature on the shitter. ~ Lewis Black

Our literature is in great shape. ~ James Welch

Two adolescent girls on a hot summer night
hardly the material of great literature, which tends to endow all male experience (that of those twin brothers who found themselves adrift so many years ago in the dark northern woods for instance) with universal radiance. Faithless sons, wars and typhoons, fields of blood, greed and knives: our literature's full of such stories. And yet suppose for an instant that it wasn't the complacent father but his bored daughter who was the Prime Mover; suppose that what came first wasn't an appetite for drama but the urge to awaken it. Mightn't we then permit a single summer in the lives of two bored girls to represent an essential stage in the history of the universe? ~ Kathryn Davis

Your father may never have produced one of those stuffy tomes we call great literature, but he left the world a substantial collection of delightful adventure stories. ~ David E. Fessenden

Were I more conversant with literature and its great names, I could go on quoting them ad infinitum and acknowledge my debt for the merit you have been generous enough to find in my work. ~ Knut Hamsun

It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born? ~ Jeff VanderMeer

THIS SHOP IS HAUNTED by the ghosts
Of all great literature, in hosts;
We sell no fakes or trashes.
Lovers of books are welcome here,
No clerks will babble in your ear,
Please smoke
but don't drop ashes!
Browse as long as you like.
Prices of all books plainly marked.
If you want to ask questions, you'll find the proprietor
where the tobacco smoke is thickest.
We pay cash for books.
We have what you want, though you may not know you want it.
Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing.
Let us prescribe for you.
By R. & H. MIFFLIN, ~ Christopher Morley

So the obvious, then: the liberal arts in general, and especially reading seriously, offer an opening to a wider life, the powers of active citizenship (including the willingness to vote); reading strengthens perception, judgment, and character; it creates understanding of other people and oneself, maybe kindliness and wit, and certainly the ability to endure solitude, both in the common sense of empty-room loneliness and the cosmic sense of empty-universe loneliness. Reading fiction carries you further into imagination and invention than you would be capable of on your own, takes you into other people's lives, and often, by reflection, deeper into your own. I will indulge a resounding tautology: every great civilization, including ours, has had a great literature and great readers. If literature matters less to young people than it once did, we are all in trouble. ~ David Denby

What distinguishes pulp fiction from great literature is how emphatically the work challenges us to interpret it. ~ Bruce Meyer

No one bothered reading the books and understanding - and again, I'm not being high-falutin' about it - but I think our books are great literature with great metaphors of real life dealing with fears and hopes. ~ Avi Arad

As with any great literature, there are probably as many ways to read William Faulkner's writing as there are readers. There are hundreds of books devoted to interpretations of his novels, numerous biographies, and every year high school teachers and college professors guide their students through one or more of the novels. But after all is said and done, there are the books themselves, and the pleasure of reading them can be deep and lasting. The language Faulkner uses ranges from the poetically beautiful, nearly biblical to the coarse sounds of rough dialect. His characters linger in the mind, whether for their heroism or villainy, their stoicism or self-indulgence, their honesty or deceitfulness or self-deception, their wisdom or stupidity, their gentleness or cruelty. In short, like Shakespeare, William Faulkner understood what it means to be human. ~ William Faulkner

So
I confess I have been a rake at reading. I have read those things which I ought not to have read, and I have not read those things which I ought to have read, and there is no health in me
if by health you mean an inclusive and coherent knowledge of any body of great literature. I can only protest, like all rakes in their shameful senescence, that I have had a good time. ~ Robertson Davies

But why," he said with animation, "do the English not read their own great literature?"
Victor laughed triumphantly, and said, "Because at school they are made to hate it. ~ Olaf Stapledon

When you internalize an author whose vision or philosophy is both rich and out of fashion, you gain a certain immunity from the pressures of the contemporary. The modern world, with it's fads, propaganda, and advertising, is forever trying to herd us into conformity. Great literature can help us to remain fad-proof. ~ Joseph Sobran

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

Novels are excluded from "serious reading," so that the man who, bent on self-improvement, has been deciding to devote ninety minutes three times a week to a complete study of the works of Charles Dickens will be well advised to alter his plans. The reason is not that novels are not serious-some of the great literature of the world is in the form of prose fiction-the reason is that bad novels out not to be read, and that good novels never demand any appreciable mental application on the part of the reader. A good novel rushes you forward like a skiff down a stream, and you arrive at the end, perhaps breathless, but unexhausted. The best novels involve the least strain. Now in the cultivation of the mind one of the most important factors is precisely the feeling of strain, of difficulty, of a task which one part of you is anxious to achieve and another part of you is anxious to shirk; and that feeling cannot be got in facing a novel. ~ Arnold Bennett

Oldboy makes us feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. It's a grand, gritty, indelible experience, the sort of picture that mimics great literature in the way it envelops you in a well-told story while also evoking subtle but strong gradations of emotion. ~ Stephanie Zacharek

Within a week I walked the streets of Tel-Aviv, I wandered around Budapest and found myself admiring the Architecture of Paris. That's the power of great literature. ~ Byron Ortiz

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote. ~ E. M. Forster

As far as people communicating with each other well I think that listening is important. You know really trying to read between the lines of what some body is saying and trying to read their mind a little bit where there at because most people don't really say what they're feeling. Which is the bones of great literature. ~ Joy Behar

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to. ~ Stephen King

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch. ~ P.D. James

C. S. Lewis said it this way: "In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. . . . I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."12 ~ Sarah Arthur

We're going to create factory jobs for recent immigrants, and Donald Trump is going to take care of them. That's why his numbers, even right now, in this negative period, are holding pretty strong, because people want a leader that's going to make this country great again and have a strong economy. ~ Jeff Sessions

Beneath the great sisterhood of stars unfurling in the night sky ... ~ Pat Conroy