Modern Literature Quotes

The truth is, I can't help the way people perceive anything, from the role of financial industry in the economic crisis, to the place of women's fiction in the canon of modern literature, to the rank of mint chocolate chip ice cream as a favorite Baskin-Robbins flavor. ~ Erin Duffy

The modern mind ... is interested above all in subtleties, equivocations and the subterranean complexities which dominate the average man and compose his life ... modern literature is concerned with the twilight, the passive rather than the active mind ... those undercurrents which flow beneath the apparently firm surface.
(Joyce to Arthur Power) ~ James Joyce

People often seem surprised that I choose to write science fiction and fantasy - I think they expect a history professor to write historical fiction, or literary fiction, associating academia with the kinds of novels that academic lit critics prefer. But I feel that speculative fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy, is a lot more like the pre-modern literature I spend most of my time studying than most modern literature is. Ursula Le Guin has described speculative fiction authors as "realists of a larger reality" because we imagine other ways of being, alternatives to how people live now, different worlds, and raise questions about hope and change and possibilities that different worlds contain.

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Writing for a more distant audience, authors tended to be speculative, using exotic perspectives, fantastic creatures, imaginary lands, allegories, prophecies, stories within stories, techniques which, like science fiction and fantasy, use alternatives rather than one reality in order to ask questions, not about the way things are, but about plural ways things have been and could be. Such works have an empathy across time, expecting and welcoming an audience as alien as the other worlds that they describe. When I read Voltaire responding to Francis Bacon, responding to Petrarch, responding to Boethius, responding to Seneca, responding to Plutarch, I want to respond to them too, to pass it on. So it makes sense to me to answer in the genre people ha ~ Ada Palmer

Algernon. The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility! Jack. That wouldn't be at all a bad thing. Algernon. Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow. Don't try it. You should leave that to people who haven't been at a University. They do it so well in the daily papers. ~ Oscar Wilde

Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going. ~ Virginia Woolf

Well, there's just some universal truths in a way that I've just observed to be true. You read Voltaire. You read modern literature. Anywhere you go, there's these observations about romantic love and what it does people, and these rotten feelings that rarely are people meaning to do that to each other. ~ Feist

It is, of course, much easier for a literary character to take a risk for love. The realities of social strata and responsibility mean nothing but a plot point in today's modern literature, but outside of these stories we are not pushing for change. The ideals we embody in our art rarely play themselves out in our lives. What would happen if we took the example of our fictional heroes; what if each of us was a Don Juan? ~ Evelyn Pryce

A precious performance, Blaine had called it, in that gently forbearing tone he used when they talked about novels, as though he was sure that she, with a little more time and a little more wisdom, would come to accept that the novels he liked were superior, novels written by young and youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness. She had read many of them, because he recommended them, but they were like cotton candy that so easily evaporated from her tongue's memory. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Modern literature is a north-east wind
a blight of the human soul. I take credit to myself for having helped to make it so. The way to produce fine fruit is to blight the flower. You call this a paradox. Marry, so be it. ~ Thomas Love Peacock

This duality has been reflected in classical as well as modern literature as reason versus passion, or mind versus intuition. The split between the conscious mind and the unconscious. There are moments in each of our lives when our verbal-intellect suggests one course, and our hearts, or intuition, another. ~ Robert E. Ornstein

The classic literature is always modern. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal..The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I think people should take mythology much more seriously, because it tells us an awful lot about the history of the human race. We tend to dismiss it as 'fairy tales,' when it isn't. Fairy tales in themselves are about fundamentals of human nature. And they keep being reinvented in different ways. Fantasy acknowledges that, whereas a lot of modern literature is trying to distance itself from 'story,' never mind anything else. Which is why a lot of books are read by the critics, then people buy them, put them on their shelves, and don't really read them much, because they're not very interesting! ~ Jan Siegel

The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably 'Doctor Who.' What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe. ~ Terry Pratchett

Christ and the life of Christ is at this moment inspiring the literature of the world as never before, and raising it up a witness against waste and want and war. It may confess Him, as in Tolstoi's work it does, or it may deny Him, but it cannot exclude Him; and in the degree that it ignores His spirit, modern literature is artistically inferior. In other words, all good literature is now Christmas literature. ~ William Dean Howells

Just as serious modern literature does not have plain old bad guys, sophisticated movies may also avoid such stock figures. ~ Roy F. Baumeister

We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence. ~ William Butler Yeats

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature. ~ Helen Vendler

I hate brandy...it stinks of modern literature. ~ Harold Pinter

I sow all sorts of seeds, and get no great harvest from any one of them. I am cursed with susceptibility in every direction, and effective faculty in none. I care for painting and music; I care for classic literature, and mediaeval literature, and modern literature; I flutter all ways, and fly in none. ~ George Eliot

Extol Jewish virtue, modern Zionism and the Israeli Defense Forces. ~ Geraldo Rivera

And yet, as you all know, joining humanity is never a simple matter. By beginning to live the same temporality as Westerners, the Japanese now had to live two temporalities simultaneously. On the one hand, there was Time with a capital "T," which flows in the West. On the other hand, there was time with a small "t," which flows in Japan. Moreover, from that point on, the latter could exist only in relation to the former. It could no longer exist independently, yet it could not be the same as the other, either. If I, as a Japanese, find this new historical situation a bit tragic, it's not because Japanese people now had a live in two temporalities. It's rather because as a result of having to do so, they had no choice but to enter the asymmetrical relationship that had marked and continues to mark the modern world - the asymmetrical relationship between the West and the non-West, which is tantamount, however abstractly, to the asymmetrical relationship between what is universal and all the rest that is merely particular. ~ Minae Mizumura

The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn ... tired of common sense and civilization. ~ F.L. Lucas

You've a perfect right to call me as impractical as a dormouse, and to feel I'm out of touch with life. But this is the point where we simply can't see eye to eye. We've nothing whatever in common. Don't you see. . . it's not an accident that's drawn me from Blake to Whitehead, it's a certain line of thought which is fundamental to my whole approach. You see, there's something about them both. . . They trusted the universe. You say I don't know what the modern world's like, but that's obviously untrue. Anyone who's spent a week in London knows just what it's like. . . if you mean neurosis and boredom and the rest of it. And I do read a modern novel occasionally, in spite of what you say. I've read Joyce and Sartre and Beckett and the rest, and every atom in me rejects what they say. They strike me as liars and fools. I don't think they're dishonest so much as hopelessly tired and defeated."

Lewis had lit his pipe. He did it as if Reade were speaking to someone else. Now he said, smiling faintly, "I don't think we're discussing modern literature."

Reade had an impulse to call the debater's trick, but he repressed it. Instead he said quietly, "We're discussing modern life, and you brought up the subject. And I'm trying to explain why I don't think that murders and wars prove your point. I'm writing about Whitehead because his fundamental intuition of the universe is the same as my own. I believe like Whitehead that the universe is a single organism that so ~ Colin Wilson

Perversity is the muse of modern literature. ~ Susan Sontag

Roberto Calasso's survey of the renewed interest in myth demonstrates how decisive the gods' influence was on modern literature. Calasso is not only immensely learned; he is one of the most original thinkers and writers we have today. ~ Charles Simic

The function of a writer is to call a spade a spade. If words are sick, it is up to us to cure them. Instead of that, many writers live off this sickness. In many cases modern literature is a cancer of words ... There is nothing more deplorable than the literary practice which, I believe, is called poetic prose and which consists of using words for the obscure harmonics which reosund about them and which are made up of vague meanings which are in contradiction with the clear meaning ... That is not all: we are living in an age of mystifications. Some are fundamental ones which are due to the structure of society; some are secondary. At any rate, the social order today rests upon the mystification of consciousness, as does disorder as well. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much. ~ Vladimir Putin

Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape. ~ Toni Morrison

But I hate to hear you talking so like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days. ~ Jane Austen

For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete. ~ Lafcadio Hearn

There is, therefore, a temptation to return to an explanation which automatically discharges the victim of responsibility: it seems quite adequate to a reality in which nothing strikes us more forcefully than the utter innocence of the individual caught in the horror machine and his utter inability to change his fate. Terror, however, is only in the last instance of its development a mere form of government. In order to establish a totalitarian regime, terror must be presented as an instrument for carrying out a specific ideology; and that ideology must have won the adherence of many, and even a majority, before terror can be stabilized. The point for the historian is that the Jews, before becoming the main victims of modern terror, were the center of Nazi ideology. And an ideology which has to persuade and mobilize people cannot choose its victim arbitrarily. ~ Hannah Arendt

no doubt, the early traumatic shocks that young hardy brown experienced had a permanent impact on his future development and capacity to deal with the real world.... the years with the mighty mites within the orphanage setting, a term that we seldom see in modern society, provided him with a safe and non-threatening enclave with which to develop. certainly, the competitive, action-oriented game of football, as meshed with positive team experiences, added to the supportive culture. ~ Jim Dent

The confused medley of meditations on art and literature in which he had indulged since his isolation, as a dam to bar the current of old memories, had been rudely swept away, and the onrushing, irresistible wave crashed into the present and future, submerging everything beneath the blanket of the past, filling his mind with an immensity of sorrow, on whose surface floated, like futile wreckage, absurd trifles and dull episodes of his life. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

The case I shall find evidence for is that when literature arrives, it expels science. ~ Peter Medawar

English is, from my point of view as an Americanist, an ethnicity. And English literature should be studied in Comparative Literature. And American literature should be a discipline, certainly growing from England and France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, and the Native traditions, particularly because those helped form the American canon. Those are our backgrounds. And then we'd be doing it the way it ought to be done. And someday I hope that it will be. ~ Paula Gunn Allen

A howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling. - ~ Henry David Thoreau

Truth is independent of all dogmas, ancient or modern. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Annie's message is timeless, her shining spirit and healing gift from the Spiritual Universe will capture your heart. She was born with birth defects in a time when special children and their mothers were put to death or banished. But have things changed really that much? Have they changed enough? "No!" Bullying, abuse, ridicule, and inequality thrives in the lives of women and children in our global modern society, just as surely as it did in the mid-1600s Colonial America. Based on factual research. ~ Deborah A.Bowman

Just so long as all our literature is pervaded with the thought that women are inferior, so long will our sex be held in a low estimate. ~ Lillie Devereux Blake

A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, "What is the earliest sign of civilization?" The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon.

Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, "A healed femur."

A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend.

Mead explained that where the law of the jungle - the survival of the fittest - rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur. ~ Ira Byock

Translators are the shadow heroes of literature. ~ Paul Auster

That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don't have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra. ~ Anne Rice

We will never know peace in the world without balance. And we will never know balance without justice for all. Yet, justice exists only where there is fairness and equality
when every man and country is treated and viewed equally. My father believes that there is no such thing as justice because all his life he has witnessed the tipping of the scales. We must change this widespread mentality by making equality a reality, not just something we read and hear about on the TV and in literature. ~ Suzy Kassem

Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I don't believe in competition in literature. One star or five doesn't matter. It's the words that count, not the opinion. ~ ML Buck

It is not my intention to explain Turkey, its culture and its problems. My literature has a universal concern: I want to bring people and their emotions closer to my readers, not explain Turkish politics. ~ Orhan Pamuk

War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious and their method too clearly defined. One exhausts what they have to say in a very short time, and then they become as tedious as one's relations. ~ Oscar Wilde

Freedom without the strength to support it and, if need be, defend it, would be a cruel delusion. And the strength to defend freedom can itself only come from widespread industrialisation and the infusion of modern science and technology into the country's economic life. ~ Jamsetji Tata

The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse. ~ Donna J. Haraway

All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram. ~ Delmore Schwartz

I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art. ~ Anne Stevenson

What's the best way to say because it's too embarrassing to talk to a crush about sex and read an explicit thing they wrote while they're right there? ~ C.B. Lee

Leave the rest to the gods. ~ Horace

Whenever you're out of town, no matter modern communications, you feel a little bit out of touch. ~ Richard Armitage

His spirit chaunged house and wente ther,
As I cam nevere, I kan nat tellen wher. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

We know now that in modern warfare, fought on any considerable scale, there can be no possible economic gain for any side. Win or lose, there is nothing but waste and destruction. ~ Lester B. Pearson

I think that if a person doesn't feel cynical then they're out of phase with the 20th century. Being cynical is the only way to deal with modern civilization - you can't just swallow it whole. ~ Frank Zappa