Top 56 History Literary Quotes
#1. The linguistic and literary reality of the biblical tradition is folkloristic in essence. The concept of a benei Israel ... is a reflection of no sociopolitical entity of the historical state of Israel of the Assyrian period
Thomas L. Thompson
#2. It is a curious fact of literary history that a story which describes the loss of a gigantic prize provided the author with the greatest prize of his career. -
Ernest Hemingway,
#3. Many of the characters who appear in the pages of the Fourth Gospel are literary creations of its author and were never intended to be understood as real people, who actually lived in history.
John Shelby Spong
#4. You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.
William Landay
#5. A writer's place in a nation's literary history cannot be judged by whether or not he is capable of writing a book as heavy as a brick. That must rest on his contributions to the development and enrichment of that nation's language.
Mo Yan
#6. As the political sky darkened, the court was lost in a last idyll of pleasure gardens, courtesans and mushairas, or poetic symposia, Sufi devotions and visits to pirs, as literary and religious ambition replaced the political variety.
William Dalrymple
#7. 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
#8. Some writers refuse to lay their heads peaceably on the pillow of literary history in order to give posterity good dreams.
review in London Review of Books, of the works of Knut Hamsun (26 nov 1998)
James Wood
#9. I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.
John Kennedy Toole
#10. Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.
Robert Hall
#11. Here is history seen, endured, and created at the same time ... .. If you believe only that which you know to be true, you will trouble yourself with very little belief."
On Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War" in "Fifty Literary Pillars".
William H Gass
#12. It can do truth no service to blind the fact, known to all who have the most ordinary acquaintance with literary history, that a large portion of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected the Christian faith.
John Stuart Mill
#13. I have written a number of short biographical studies of insignificant personages from literary history. My interest has always been in writing biographies of the also-rans: people who lived in the shadow of fame in their own lifetime and who, since their death, have sunk into profound obscurity.
Diane Setterfield
#14. No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.
P. J. O'Rourke
#15. Historical fiction is not only a respectable literary form; it is a standing reminder of the fact that history is about human beings.
Helen Cam
#16. Whether consciously or unconsciously, I felt myself drawn to writing a female character who was pretty flawed and not very virtuous or wonderful or attractive in these ways that throughout literary history we've come to expect female characters to be.
Leni Zumas
#17. Rummaging in the storehouses of religious or literary history for myth-matter for ideational uses is of the nature of spiritual vulgarity.
Laura Riding
#18. History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.
Henry Adams
#19. Narration, after all, isn't just a literary function. It represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning. Television replaced this concerted quest for meaning with a frantic pursuit of wonder.
Steve Almond
#20. What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle.
Claude Calame
#21. Truth is produced, not discovered, and is a property not of the world but of statements.
Lee Patterson
#22. We can study files for decades, but every so often we are tempted to throw up our hands and declare that history is merely another literary genre: the past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be a parliamentary report.
Julian Barnes
#23. The history of literature is very far from being one of simple progress.
C.S. Lewis
#24. If you had to choose between art and the slogan, or between history and the slogan, you might as well choose the slogan and have done with pretending even to care about art and history. The reduction of all things to politics must reduce them, in their own right, to irrelevance.
Anthony Esolen
#25. Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.
Mason Cooley
#26. What is more precious: a thousand answers derived from one question? Or, one answer ... from a thousand questions?
G.F. Smith
#28. History is indeed stranger than fiction. The twists and turns of human history are too outlandish for to be believable in any work of fiction.
A.E. Samaan
#29. Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.
David Cronenberg
#30. The heroes of literary history have been no less remarkable for what they have suffered than for what they have achieved.
Samuel Johnson
#31. Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.
Dan Simmons
#32. The book I'm working on next, which will be my fifth, returns to literary history. I really do love literary history, and I have plenty more ideas on it.
Matthew Pearl
#33. Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related.
Heinrich Heine
#34. I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants.
Matthew Pearl
#35. Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
Bertolt Brecht
#36. I'm beyond thrilled to be working with Faber, whose literary history is second to none. And I'm even more excited to bring my books to a wider audience in the U.K.
John Corey Whaley
#37. What is commonly called literary history is actually a record of choices.
Louise Bernikow
#38. That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.
Bertrand Russell
#39. The most enviable genius in literary history is the guy who invented alphabet soup: nobody knows who he is.
Philip Roth
#40. If you look at history you'll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.
Desiderius Erasmus
#41. Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.
Philip Zaleski
#42. Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.
Slobodan Milosevic
#43. It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.
Anna Quindlen
#45. Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history.
Howard Mumford Jones
#46. Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.
And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.
Anna Quindlen
#47. But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history
that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires.
C.S. Lewis
#48. What do you mean to do?'
'Make literary history, I guess.
Paula McLain
#49. Give the villagers village arithmetic, village geography, village history and the literary knowledge that they must use daily, i.e. reading and writing letters, etc.
Mahatma Gandhi
#50. In my view, the gospels are true, not historically, but theologically, or, as I would argue, prophetically! What we have is, the Messiah's history written in advance in story form.
Eli Of Kittim
#51. Maurice Kenny stands at the forefront of his generation. Few writers of any ethnicity are destined to be remembered in the mainstream of literary history; I believe that Kenny's contributions as a poet are among those few. He writes from the center, as our Elders would say.
Wendy Rose
#52. Because Fascism is a lie, it is condemned to literary sterility. And when it is past, it will have no history, except the bloody history of murder.
Ernest Hemingway,
#53. Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.
James Shapiro
#54. Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind.
Philip Zaleski
#55. That rewriting of literary history is most obvious in the case of The Yage Letters, where I was able to show that the true history inverts the official one.
Oliver Harris
#56. In all literary history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the unessential.
James Russell Lowell
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