Postcolonial Literature Quotes

The stories surrounding eating durians remind us that literature should incorporate low culture, bringing it closer to lived reality. These legends come not from the pens of the elite, but are assembled from the words of the masses, both written and spoken, passed from one person to another - the only way to create a text this deep and compelling. ~ Wong Yoon Wah

To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher. ~ William James

Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny. ~ Carl Sandburg

Don Quixote is not an imaginary person; he is as real as Alexander the Great. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

We were always eating expired things. Milk, bread, biscuits, cake. We forgot about them as they sat around the house and just as they had gone bad, we put them in our mouths. Chocolates I brought back with me from Australia, cheeses in last year's Christmas hamper, juice from the last time someone decided to go grocery shopping. We didn't always realize they tasted funny – not everything curdles and a two-month-old orange can be just as sweet. When we did, it was usually too late. Sometimes it wasn't. We finished what we had started anyway. ~ Cheryl Julia Lee

There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct. ~ Richard Tol

It's when people begin to fancy that they actually know something about literature that they cease to be literarily interesting, or even of any use to those that are. ~ David Foster Wallace

Writers are not just writers, they are creators of worlds, sculptors of the mind, they are architects of language. ~ Jamie L. Harding

No one lives long in a war. ~ Sanchit Gupta

I was astonished at how wonderful these books were; and even though I was occasionally discomforted when someone, having asked me what book I had in my pocket, looked aghast when I pulled out a copy of Heidi or Finn Family Moomintroll, I soon realized that my then-present condition of "second childhood" was not one of senility and depression but of renewal and awakening. ~ Jonathan Cott

If then the power of speech is as great as any that can be named, - if the origin of language is by many philosophers considered nothing short of divine - if by means of words the secrets of the heart are brought to light, pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief is carried off, sympathy conveyed, experience recorded, and wisdom perpetuated, - if by great authors the many are drawn up into unity, national character is fixed, a people speaks, the past and the future, the East and the West are brought into communication with each other, - if such men are, in a word, the spokesmen and the prophets of the human family - it will not answer to make light of Literature or to neglect its study: rather we may be sure that, in proportion as we master it in whatever language, and imbibe its spirit, we shall ourselves become in our own measure the ministers of like benefits to others - be they many or few, be they in the obscurer or the more distinguished walks of life - who are united to us by social ties, and are within the sphere of our personal influence. ~ John Henry Newman

Books have power to bring you glory or doom, it all depends on perception. ~ Nikita Dudani

A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes senility or the maiden blush of youth. ~ John Barth

When I speak to teachers, it's always remarkable to me how unaware they are of the research literature - especially young teachers or student teachers." Yet when it comes to homework, most teachers are true believers. ~ Nancy Kalish

We have devoted ourselves to the government and extension of the Church, and, among other objects, we have conceived it to be our duty to foster especially literature and the fine arts ... next to knowledge and true worship of the Creator, nothing is better or more useful to mankind than such studies. ~ Pope Leo X

Reading good literature is not so different then taking good drugs, do it enough and it will certainly alter your mind. The drugs can have positive yet often negative affects as well, however literature will always have positive affects. Certainly no one has ever over dosed from reading too much, as far as I know. The best literature should bend your reality until you can tie it in a knot.
-Andrew Pritchard ~ Andrew James Pritchard

In terms of literary history, the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is seen as a landmark. The volume contains many of the best-known Romantic poems. The second edition in 1800 contained a Preface in which Wordsworth discusses the theories of poetry which were to be so influential on many of his and Coleridge's contemporaries. The Preface represents a poetic manifesto which is very much in the spirit of the age. The movement towards greater freedom and democracy in political and social affairs is paralleled by poetry which sought to overturn the existing regime and establish a new, more 'democratic' poetic order. To do this, the writers used 'the real language of men' (Preface to Lyrical Ballads) and even, in the case of Byron and Shelley, got directly involved in political activities themselves.

The Romantic age in literature is often contrasted with the Classical or Augustan age which preceded it. The comparison is valuable, for it is not simply two different attitudes to literature which are being compared but two different ways of seeing and experiencing life.

The Classical or Augustan age of the early and mid-eighteenth century stressed the importance of reason and order. Strong feelings and flights of the imagination had to be controlled (although they were obviously found widely, especially in poetry). The swift improvements in medicine, economics, science and engineering, together with rapid developments in both agricultural and industrial t ~ Ronald Carter

I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell. ~ Colum McCann

"Someone": I understood that this was a character who in her own life her voice hadn't much been heard and in literature her life isn't much heard. For me, it was resisting all the more appealing characters and listening to the voice that hadn't been much heard from. ~ Alice McDermott

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

You will do yourself a disservice if you confine your reading to the rising star whose six-figure, two-book contract might seem to indicate where your own work should be heading. I'm not saying you shouldn't read such writers, some of whom are excellent and deserving of celebrity. I'm only pointing out that they represent the dot at the end of the long, glorious, complex sentence in which literature has been written. ~ Francine Prose

The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine. ~ Ian McEwan

You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for. ~ Napoleon Hill

Deny everything and you will easily pass for a man of ability; it's a well known trick. Simple hearted people are quite ready to conclude that you are worth more than what you deny. And that's often an error. In the first place, you can pick holes in anything; and secondly, even if you are right in what you say, it's the worse for you, your intellect, directed by simple negation, grows colorless and withers up. While you gratify your vanity, you are deprived of the true consolations of thought;life--the essence of life--evades your jaundiced and petty criticism, and you end by scolding and becoming ridiculous. Only one who loves has the right to censure and find fault. ~ Ivan Turgenev

There is no joy nobler than suffering for the sake of love for man. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

I never thought that history would become one of my life's passions. I never even liked history when I was at school, apart from the context of literature, music, and art. But history has lately been revealed to me as the place where I live, where we all live, side by invisible side with others who - if we get quiet enough and listen carefully enough - will touch us and tell us their stories. ~ Barbara Quick

Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort. ~ Jeanette Winterson

My body has certainly wandered a good deal, but I have an uneasy suspicion that my mind has not wandered enough. ~ Noel Coward

No one's serious at seventeen,
When lindens line the promenades ~ Arthur Rimbaud

Until I read Anne Frank's diary, I had found books a literal escape from what could be the harsh reality around me. After I read the diary, I had a fresh way of viewing the both literature and the world. From then on, I found I was impatient with books that were not honest or that were trivial and frivolous. ~ Alexandra Fuller

This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an efffect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic qulaity. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

The contemplation of beauty in nature, in art, in literature, in human character, diffuses through our being a soothing and subtle joy, by which the heart's anxious and aching cares are softly smiled away. ~ Edwin Percy Whipple

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies. ~ Julian Barnes

Insomnia

I wonder
If those talks matter
Few done in the clarity of day
Or the many
Done at 3 a.m. in the morning ~ Irum Zahra

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair. ~ Terry Eagleton

It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element. ~ Irvine Welsh

People who want to change everything in the world but never think of changing themselves are clapping with one palm. ~ Subhan Zein

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese. ~ Lafcadio Hearn

What is literature compared with cooking? The one is shadow, the other is substance. ~ E. V. Lucas