Subaltern Literature Quotes

Hell, everybody is a masochist. Some of us are just a little more private. ~ Cecil Brown

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

It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble. ~ Alain De Botton

After the birth of printing books became widespread. Hence everyone throughout Europe devoted himself to the study of literature ... Every year, especially since 1563, the number of writings published in every field is greater than all those produced in the past thousand years. The Paracelsians have created medicine anew and the Copernicans have created astronomy anew. I really believe that at last the world is alive, indeed seething, and that the stimuli of these remarkable conjunctions did not act in vain. ~ Johannes Kepler

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too. ~ Alain De Botton

These capacities for randomness may have been amplified into human creativity through sexual and social selection. ~ Geoffrey Miller

But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant. Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave - a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you'd have in conversation with a friend. Even ~ Michel Houellebecq

An intellectual can work at the university, or, better, go to work for an American university, where the literature departments are just as bad as in Mexico, but that doesn't mean they won't get a late-night call from someone speaking in the name of the state, someone who offers them a better job, better pay, something the intellectual thinks he deserves, and intellectuals always think they deserve better. ~ Roberto Bolano

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. ~ Gustave Flaubert

I'm kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother's a children's librarian, and all of the children's literature I read was from her childhood - E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn't children's literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literature. I thought I was of that world. ~ Jefferson Mays

Like the bat, the Sufi is asleep to 'things of the day' - the familiar struggle for existence which the ordinary man finds all-important - and vigilant while others are asleep. In other words, he keeps awake the spiritual attention dormant in others. That 'mankind sleeps in a nightmare of unfulfillment' is a commonplace of Sufi literature ~ Idries Shah

What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness. ~ Graham Greene

Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature. ~ Roger Ebert

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil. ~ Georges Bataille

Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement. ~ William Stafford

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper. ~ Terry Pratchett

In the First World War we lost in all about three million killed. In the Second we lost twenty million (so Khrushchev said; according to Stalin it was only seven million. Was Nikita being too generous? Or couldn't Iosif keep track of his capital?) All those odes! All those obelisks and eternal flames! Those novels and poems! For a quarter of a century all Soviet literature has been drunk on that blood! ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into. Lorrie Moore ~ Mary Karr

- I had a good classical education, and a positive distaste for business of any kind; that was the capital with which I faced the world [ ... ] I reflected, then, on my want of prospects, and I determined to embark in literature.
- Really; that was strange. You seem to be in pretty comfortable circumstances, though. ~ Arthur Machen

To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life. ~ Nicole Krauss

Ground) - "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her" - has entered our literature and our consciousness. This episode ~ Christopher Hitchens

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca. ~ W.S. Merwin

Spain's churches, monuments, language, and literature are richly redolent of a unique, multifaith heritage. Muslims, Christians, and Jews had worked, worshipped, and interacted in Spain on a scale unparalleled and even unimaginable elsewhere in the medieval West. ~ Christopher Lowney

A well-read writer, with good taste, is one who has the command of the wit of other men; he searches where knowledge is to be found; and though he may not himself excel in invention, his ingenuity may compose one of those agreeable books, the deliciae of literature, that will out-last the fading meteors of his day. ~ Isaac D'Israeli

The Chicago literary tradition is born not out of its Universities, but out of the sports desk and the city desk of its newspapers. Hemingway revolutionized English prose. His inspiration was the telegraph, whose use, at Western Union, taught this: every word costs something,
This, of course, is the essence of poetry, which is the essence of great prose. Chicagoan literature came from the newspaper, whose purpose, in those days, was to Tell What Happened. Hemingway's epiphany was reported, earlier, by Keats as " 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' --that is all ye know earth, and all ye need to know." I would add to Keats' summation only this: "Don't let the other fellow piss on your back and tell you it's raining."
I believe one might theoretically forgive one who cheats at business, but never one who cheats at cards; for business adversaries operate at arm's length, the cardplayer under the strict rules of the game, period.
That was my first political epiphany.
And now, I have written a political book.
What are the qualifications for a Political Writer?
They are, I believe, the same as those of an aspiring critic: an inability to write for the Sports Page. ~ David Mamet

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

To withdraw is not to run away, and to stay is no wise action, when there's more reason to fear than to hope. ~ Miguel De Cervantes

Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty. ~ Honore De Balzac

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people. ~ Ezra Pound

In a talk at a recent Phi Beta Kappa meeting, Duke University professor Katherine Hayles confessed, "I can't get my students to read whole books anymore."10 Hayles teaches English; the students she's talking about are students of literature. ~ Nicholas Carr

There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow. ~ Jules Renard

In all ages woman has been the source of all that is pure, unselfish, and heroic in the spirit and life of man.....poetry and fiction are based upon woman's love, and the movements of history are mainly due to the sentiments or ambitions she has inspired......there is no aspiration which any man here to-night entertains, no achievement he seeks to accomplish, no great and honorable ambition he desires to gratify, which is not directly related to either or both a mother or a wife. From the hearth-stone around which linger the recollections of our mother, from the fireside where our wife awaits us, come all the purity, all the hope, and all the courage with which we fight the battle of life. The man who is not thus inspired, who labors not so much to secure the applause of the world as the solid and more precious approval of his home, accomplishes little of good for others or of honor for himself. I close with the hope that each of us may always have near us:

'A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command,
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of an angel light. ~ Chauncey Mitchell DePew

Stephen King. Now I'm not crazy about him, but he's a great a writer. ~ Mickey Spillane

I was inspired to write this book by those who are sceptical of the power of freedom to change the world. ~ Natan Sharansky

He suddenly saw the enterprise of literature as essentially mad. ~ Mark Beauregard

I searched modern fiction and poetry for clues to how we confronted and evaded reality, how we articulated our experience and turned to language not to revel ourselves but to hide. I was as sure then as I am now that by looking at contemporary Iranian fiction I could gain access to a real understanding of political and social events. (p289) ~ Azar Nafisi

What do you think of the Wilcoxes? Are they our sort? Are they likely people? Could they appreciate Helen, who is to my mind a very special sort of person? Do they care about Literature and Art? That is most important when you come to think of it. Literature and Art. Most important. How ~ E. M. Forster

I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly. ~ John Le Carre

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness. ~ Gustave Flaubert

The world is always open,
Waiting to be discovered. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Beyond the Catholic exclusionary paradigm is a larger one which is the Christian one. Christians claim that if you don't believe in Christ, you can't get to heaven. Well that eliminates two thirds of the world's population! ~ Neale Donald Walsch

I did it at night because I loved it. I never did it to make money, as a job. I just did it because I had to. ~ Danielle Steel

I've decided to cut out the part of the speech where I say anything nice about Democrats. ~ Ann Coulter