Studying Literature Quotes

The more we get away from believing and studying literature, the worst we become, the more we lose our soul. ~ Shane Warren Jones

Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic. ~ Roy Blount, Jr.

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled. ~ Barbara Tuchman

I started out studying literature, but soon discovered that science was where I actually belonged. The contrast made it all the clearer: in science classes we did things instead of just sitting around talking about things. We worked with our hands and there were concrete and almost daily payoffs. Our laboratory experiments were predesigned to work perfectly and elegantly every time, and the more of them that you did, the bigger the machines and the more exotic were the chemicals that they let you use. ~ Hope Jahren

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction! ~ Philip Pullman

Part of dedicating your life to studying literature is realizing that storytelling is more than just make-believe and that make-believe is far more important that we all pretend -- make believe -- it is. One way or another books tell the stories of their readers. But telling our lives is not the same as shaping them, whittling them away. Suddenly Jill had lost control. Her books had taken over and were in charge. ~ Laurie Frankel

My life has had a lot of fits and starts: before I studied literature at all I was a musician, and began undergrad as a conservatory student. I started studying literature in my third year of college, when I took a poetry course with James Longenbach that was pretty extraordinary. It changed my life. ~ Garth Greenwell

I am not against standardized tests. There are tests and tests and tests, and, to simplify, the ones I favor are criterion-referenced tests of skills, aligned with the curriculum. Social and emotional skills are important but skills are too. I find it heartbreaking that this is so often seen as an either-or choice. To get to the richness of studying literature, for example, you must first be an adept and confident reader. Whether you are is something a good test can measure. ~ Nicholas Lemann

I have spent my spare time studying literature popular with young women of this planet. One should always study the battlefield."
Sean glanced at him. "And?"
"I suggest you give up now. According to my research, in a vampire-werewolf love triangle, the vampire always gets the girl. ~ Ilona Andrews

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness. ~ Edith Wharton

Not the free individual but the lost individual; not Independence but isolation; not self-discovery but self-obsession; not the conquer but to be conquered; these are major states of mind in contemporary imaginative literature. ~ Robert A. Nisbet

...If statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky way. properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and had done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it.

"The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed; and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality? ~ Mark Twain

Everybody talks, but there is no conversation. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance. ~ Victor Hugo

It was a place nobody wanted to stay and look at, but almost everyone did. Shaped like a long, broken arm, the road contained several houses with lacerated windows and bruised walls. The Star of David was painted on their doors. Those houses were almost like lepers. At the very least, they were infected sores on the injured German terrain. ~ Markus Zusak

That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet. ~ Emily Dickinson

But now suddenly it occurs to me that by far the main protagonist of twentieth-century literature must be the chattering mind, which usually means the mind that can't make up its mind, the mind postponing action in indecision and, if we're lucky, poetry. ~ Tim Parks

The same tantalizing guile and sublime skill ... [The series is] reinforced in its claim to be one of the major literary works of this century ... Only two other writers that this reviewer can think of have each created an entire, discrete and compelling world, a totally believable entity which one might wish to inhabit, and they are Joyce and Proust. It is not pretentious to place Patrick O'Brian in the first canon of literature ... ~ Kevin Myers

The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired. ~ Nick Harkaway

But surely the will to create was a form of the will to live...? ~ Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Science fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places. It often concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community; often civilization or the race itself is in danger. ~ James Gunn

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

A classic is a work which gives pleasure to the minority which is intensely and permanently interested in literature. It lives on because the minority, eager to renew the sensation of pleasure, is eternally curious and is therefore engaged in an eternal process of rediscovery. A classic does not survive because of any ethical reason it does not survive because it conforms to certain canons, or because neglect would kill it. It survived because it is a source of pleasure and because the passionate few can no more neglect it then a bee can neglect a flower. The passionate few do not read "the right things" because they are right. That is to put the cart before the horse "the right things" are the right things solely because the passionate few like reading them …

Nobody at all is quite in a position to choose with certainty among modern works. To sift the wheat from the chaff is a process that takes an exceedingly long time. Modern works have to pass before the bar of the taste of successive Generations; whereas, with Classics, which have been through the ordeal, almost the reverse is the case. Your taste has to pass before the bar of the classics. That is the point. If you differ with a classic, it is you who are wrong, and not the book. If you differ with a modern work, you may be wrong or you may be right, but no judge is authoritative to decide your taste is unformed. It needs guidance and it needs authoritative guidance.

Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste: ~ S. I. Hayakawa

Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age. ~ Jonathan Swift

Full disclosure: I went to university as an eager young feminist for many reasons - to get away from my parents, to soak up literature and knowledge, to cease being a child, to expand my mind and my world. ~ Janine Di Giovanni

In the present day, when popular literature is running into the low levels of life, and luxuriating on the vices and follies of mankind; and when the universal pursuit of gain is trampling down the early growth of poetic feeling, and wearing out the verdure of the soul, I question whether it would not be of service for the reader occasionally to turn to these records of prouder times and loftier modes of thinking; and to steep himself to the very lips in old Spanish romance. ~ Washington Irving

When I was a worker I busied myself with socialist or, if you like, marxist literature. ~ Adolf Hitler

In France the music schools are a bit old fashioned. I was more excited about doing my own stuff or to play with my friend in my band, than studying the piano. ~ Yann Tiersen

Do thou restrain the haughty spirit in thy breast, for better far is gentle courtesy. ~ Homer

Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul. ~ Mark Twain

He only earns his freedom and his life Who takes them every day by storm. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

In the waiting room, ladies in a picturesque group surrounded a table with magazines. They stood, sat, or half reclined in the poses they saw in the pictures and, studying the models, discussed styles. ~ Boris Pasternak

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin is universally applicable. We should regard it not as a dogma, but as a guide to action. Studying it is not merely a matter of learning terms and phrases but of learning Marxism-Leninism as the science of revolution. It is not just a matter of understanding the general laws derived by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin from their extensive study of real life and revolutionary experience, but of studying their standpoint and method in examining and solving problems. ~ Mao Zedong

Good men have the fewest fears. He has but one great fear who fears to do wrong; he has a thousand who has overcome it. ~ Christian Nestell Bovee

There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can't tell you why. ~ Jim Harrison

An optimist is a fellow who believes what's going to be will be postponed. ~ Kin Hubbard

But with 9/11, we found that people tended to come back to the networks and the people who had been our core viewers in the past came back and they have stayed with us. ~ Bob Schieffer

...our job sometimes is to divorce ourselves from the fact that I've got to constantly be gifting young people with tools and equip them with - I'm imparting lessons upon them. Sometimes it about, look you hate reading, my job is to figure out how to help you not hate reading. The rest of it we can get to, but I got to figure out how to get you engaged. In order to do that sometimes you got to pull back. Right. You got to put a little grease in the pot. Right. So if that means you've got to have them reading rap lyrics in your class, then that's what it is. If that means you got to have them reading comic books or the athletes reading Sports Illustrated and the sports section in ESPN Magazine, then that's what it is. Our job is not just - it's not to just promote literature, which is what we all do. Our job is to promote literacy and there's a difference. Right. There's a difference. Literacy is what will help them way more than what literature will do. ~ Jason Reynolds

It is the unspecified 'you' of modern love poems that I am mostly concerned with here. At least, the addressee is commonly a lover, and the very fact that the name is withheld is offered as a guarantee of the closeness and significance of the relationship. ~ John Fuller

And that's the beginning of the primary conversation in African American literature, right there: the African descendant explaining to the European descendant about how white people's actions are affecting the lives of black people.* In ~ Mat Johnson

To realize that new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other values - above personal wealth, technical power and nationalism. ~ Herbert Read

A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man. ~ Samuel Johnson

Books are carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows of the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

I am not going to claim that modern anarchism has any direct relation to Roman jurisprudence; but I do claim that it has its basis in the laws of nature rather than in the state of nature. ~ Herbert Read

Literature today is like elevator music for a narcoleptic. ~ Quentin R. Bufogle

In the NFL game today, there are a lot of better athletes than I am, and quarterbacks these days are faster than the quarterbacks have always been, they're running like crazy. But I kind of stick to my roots of the disciplined quarterback. You know, I'm doing the same routine every week, studying tapes and working hard, getting ready to play and making good decisions on Sundays. ~ Peyton Manning

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Yes, I hate blown glass art and I happen to live in the blown glass art capital of the world, Seattle, Washington. Being a part of the Seattle artistic community, I often get invited to galleries that are displaying the latest glass sculptures by some amazing new/old/mid-career glass blower. I never go. Abstract art leaves me feeling stupid and bored. Perhaps it's because I grew up inside a tribal culture, on a reservation where every song and dance had specific ownership, specific meaning, and specific historical context. Moreover, every work of art had use - art as tool: art to heal; art to honor, art to grieve. I think of the Spanish word carnal, defined as, 'Of the appetites and passions of the body.' And I think of Gertrude Stein's line, 'Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.' When asked what that line meant, Stein said, 'The poet could use the name of the thing and the thing was really there.' So when I say drum, the drum is really being pounded in this poem; when I say fancydancer, the fancydancer is really spinning inside this poem; when I say Indian singer, that singer is really wailing inside this poem. But when it comes to abstract art - when it comes to studying an organically shaped giant piece of multi-colored glass - I end up thinking, 'That looks like my kidney. Anybody's kidney, really. And frankly, there can be no kidney-shaped art more beautiful - more useful and closer to our Creator - than the kidney itself. And beyond that, this glass isn't funny. There's ~ Sherman Alexie