Literature Of The World Quotes

#1. The literature of the world has exerted its power by being translated.

Mark Van Doren

#2. It perhaps might be said
if any one dared
that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another.

Stephen Crane

#3. Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world

H.L. Mencken

#4. The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.

H.L. Mencken

#5. Not only dowomen sufferindignities in daily life, but the literature of the world proclaims their inferiority and divinely decreed subjection in all history, sacred and profane, in science, philosophy, poetry, and song.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#6. There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.

Sherman Alexie

#7. Because all of us are so ready to talk about the world we live in. We are ready to have a publishing industry that is of that world.

Mira Jacob

#8. And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s.

Thomas Keneally

#9. You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature.

Mahatma Gandhi

#10. It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?

Jeff VanderMeer

#11. Mark Twain was an artist working at the highest level. He wrote a book, his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that put America on the world stage for literature. It's almost as if, if you start reading that book as a racist, you cannot finish it and still be a racist.

Val Kilmer

#12. Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Salman Rushdie

#13. ...if you were convinced that the world had forgotten how to think and teach, if you believed it had discarded the beauty of art and literature, if you thought it had crushed the power of truth, would you let that world educate your children?

Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera

#14. Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.

Greil Marcus

#15. The growth of the imagination demands windows-windows through which we can look out at the world and windows through which we can look into ourselves. The old stories were windows in just this way.

Katherine Paterson

#16. American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.

Christopher Dawson

#17. Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

Susan Sontag

#18. I've been an avid consumer of young adult literature since I was one, and I think some people leave that stuff behind when they become old adults, but I never did. I was always interested in the fantasy world created in those novels.

Diablo Cody

#19. Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world," I said, "but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be - it isn't a mirror, it's an aspiration.

Jasper Fforde

#20. And I wondered if that was the problem with literature - it made sense only in theoretical situations and didn't often help in real life, where it took a hell of a lot more courage to live than to turn pages all alone, hidden away from the world in a corner or a bed or under a tree.

Matthew Quick

#21. Pull a thread here and you'll find it's attached to the rest of the world.

Nadeem Aslam

#22. Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.

Tom Spanbauer

#23. The end of the world can be cozy at times.

Mohsin Hamid

#24. National literature does not mean much these days; now is the age of world literature, and every one must contribute to hasten thearrival of that age.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#25. Literature provides us with experiences it would not be wise or possible to introduce into our own world and thus enlarges our understanding of the world.

Louise Rosenblatt

#26. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.

Salman Rushdie

#27. For when you looked into my mother's eyes you knew, as if He had told you, why God sent her into the world - it was to open then minds of all who looked to beautiful thoughts. And that is the beginning and end of literature.

J.M. Barrie

#28. Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, revolt against the objectified world has determined the character of art and literature.

Paul Tillich

#29. Spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. True prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#30. I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

Alice Eve

#31. The world cannot be translated;
It can only be dreamed of and touched.

Dejan Stojanovic

#32. Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large.

George Steiner

#33. I'd be doing it to screw the literary world. Those bastards all huddle in their gloomy cave and kiss each other's asses, and lick each other's wounds, and trip each other up, all the while spewing this pompous crap about the mission of literature.

Haruki Murakami

#34. I'm trying to earn a living in the way that is most enjoyable to me. I love the world of literature, and I hope to support myself in it.

Jamaica Kincaid

#35. People didn't make life, so they can't destroy it. Even if we were to wipe out every bit of life in the world, we can't touch the place life comes from. Whatever made the plants and animals and people spring up in the first place will always be there, and life will spring up again.

Jeanne DuPrau

#36. To subvert is not the aim of literature, its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. It would seem that truth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.

Gao Xingjian

#37. I don't accept the idea that literature can be just entertainment and that there is no consequences of literature in the real world.

Mario Vargas-Llosa

#38. Black children need to see their lives reflected in the books they read. If they don't, they won't feel welcome in the world of literature. The lives of African-Americans are rich and diverse, and the books our children read should reflect that.

Valerie Wilson Wesley

#39. The Meadow ... Only one of them succeeded in making a life here ... He weathered. Before a backdrop of natural beauty, he lived a life from which everything was taken but a place. He lived so close to the real world it almost let him in.

James Galvin

#40. No doubts our generation is producing another form of grub street literature.. Welcome to the world of hack writers..

Himmilicious

#41. We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.

William James

#42. The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.

Ross Macdonald

#43. Your father may never have produced one of those stuffy tomes we call great literature, but he left the world a substantial collection of delightful adventure stories.

David E. Fessenden

#44. Kim Newman's Anno Dracula is back in print, and we must celebrate. It was the first mash-up of literature, history and vampires, and now, in a world in which vampires are everywhere, it's still the best, and its bite is just as sharp. Compulsory reading, commentary, and mindgame: glorious.

Neil Gaiman

#45. Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.

W.B.Yeats

#46. These are the stories of travelers on a spiritual quest between worlds. Part mythmaker, part poet, Omar Castaeda is an original, and these stories are unlike any in our literature.

Toi Derricotte

#47. At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right.

Nigel Hamilton

#48. 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

#49. The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.

Deborah Harkness

#50. Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world.

Claire Colebrook

#51. The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but thet are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought

Bernard Bailyn

#52. The things of the world fell by the wayside, you lost your speed and your eyesight and your fucking Electric Boogaloo, but literature was eternal,

Stephen King

#53. Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites ... some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way.

Tony Kushner

#54. In the world of literature, I see prizes as more of a duty to the craft itself, rather than as something for the individual.

Wole Soyinka

#55. Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he's wrong.

Chad Harbach

#56. Now, Max, I have told you many times that you are my publisher, and permanently, as far as one can fling about the word in this too mutable world....The idea of leaving you has never for one single moment entered my head.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#57. Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.

Edward Abbey

#58. ... And the sound of the sea, like the wild-animal breath of the world itself, frightened them as it gasped and died at their feet.

Leonardo Sciascia

#59. Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves ideas from an extrahuman world.

Pierre Janet

#60. Living in a world of darkness doesn't mean we must surrender, but to survive, we need to occasionally unleash the diva from within.

Skye High

#61. I am conscious of a soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances of my life. My physical limitations are forgotten- my world lies upward, the length and the breadth and the sweep of the heavens are mine!

Helen Keller

#62. Some people might be surprised that 'Rambo's creator has a doctorate in American literature. One of my influences is Henry James, whose major theme is awareness. Whether I'm writing about military personnel, law enforcement, or De Quincey, the persistent theme is paying attention in a hostile world.

David Morrell

#63. Literature is an invitation to people to discover the world of others and the world of others is the best source to understand and to improve our own world!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#64. Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can't afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.

Alain De Botton

#65. Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics.

David Amram

#66. The literature of imaginatiion, even when tragic, is reassuring, not necessarily in the sense of offering nostalgic comfort, but because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives and therefore offers hope.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#67. I read every one of the books on the shelf marked American Negro Literature. I became a nationalist, a colour nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me.

Peter Abrahams

#68. [Mark] Twain is pointing at you. You, the reader of the book one hundred and thirty years ago and today. That is what has made it a great American novel and the most widely read book in American Literature around the world today.

Hal Holbrook

#69. 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

#70. No matter what is happening in life or in the world - war, natural disaster, poor health, pain, the death of loved ones - if existence is filled with art, music and literature, life will be fulfilling, a joy.

Karen DeCrow

#71. One of the great advantages of the study of old Norse or Icelandic literature is the insight given by it into the origin of world-wide superstitions. Norse tradition is transparent as glacier ice, and its origin is as unmistakable.

Sabine Baring-Gould

#72. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books. (p. 5)

Rabih Alameddine

#73. At the moment, if you asked me, I would say that this book is about keeping the heart of flesh in a world that wants to put in a heart of stone; and about how, regardless of the accusations regularly flung at them from all quarters, learning and literature can help their adherents accomplish that.

Pamela Dean

#74. The writer is neither saint nor tzaddik nor prophet standing at the gate; he's just another sinner who has a somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe the inconceivable reality of our world.

Etgar Keret

#75. I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large.

Kenzaburo Oe

#76. For my part, I have worked all my life with eggs and embryos of frogs. Compared to other small animals, these have figured prominently in the world of literature.

John Gurdon

#77. As writers, the world is not about individual expression entirely because we are producing works of literature and getting them out into the world.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

#78. I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.

Luke Rhinehart

#79. I call that creativity," Orville said. "The purpose of literature is to teach you how to THINK, not how to be practical. Learning to discover the connective tissue between seemingly unrelated events is the only way we are equipped to understand patterns in the real world.

Catherine Lowell

#80. Literature has the ability to open up a whole new world to children, but we need to have a share in helping them to find that door and open it with them. Let's set the example and help to foster this love of reading in our little ones.

Carmela Dutra

#81. Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature, and history - as befits a former law professor - and he has shown time and again a surprising interest in contemporary fiction.

Teju Cole

#82. "Little magazines" are, for the most part, the mayflies of the literary world.

Frederick Crews

#83. Dr Piper smiled hugely like a big cherub. 'Of course it's wonderful. The whole world is wonderful. Everything is made to fit into its place. And you and Kirsty are the most wonderful of all. Just look at the way you are made.

Colin Thiele

#84. The great writers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few years in the South Seas, but their memory of those waters was indestructible; for the nature of life in the islands commands attention to the vivid world and its even more vivid inhabitants.

James A. Michener

#85. As a filmmaker coming from one of the youngest lands in the world, New Zealand - safe, green and democratic - I was intrigued by Afghanistan, with its literature and poetry, its old land and its deep history.

Pietra Brettkelly

#86. When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.

Maya Angelou

#87. Whenever she opened a scientific book and saw whole paragraphs of incomprehensible words and symbols, she felt a sense of wonder at the great territories of learning that lay beyond her - the sum of so many noble and purposive attempts to make objective sense of the world.

Vikram Seth

#88. Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, in the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity? Do you know what I mean? Everything suddenly fits, everything's in its place.

Carol Shields

#89. My works are Chinese literature, which is part of world literature. They show the life of Chinese people as well as the country's unique culture and folk customs.

Mo Yan

#90. Attention makes the genius; all learning, fancy, science and skills depend upon it. Newton traced his discoveries to it. It builds bridges, opens new worlds, heals diseases, carries on the business of the world. Without it taste is useless, and the beauties of literature unobserved.

Robert Aris Willmott

#91. Without books, everything would have been crooked. Without books, the wisdom in books today would have been fairy and folk tales. Without books the whole truth about life would have been imaginations and a guessing game

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#92. There is so much in the world for us all if we only have the eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it to ourselves
so much in men and women, so much in art and literature, so much everywhere in which to delight, and for which to be thankful.

L.M. Montgomery

#93. People won't see Imagination in something that doesn't relate to their experience because of their own mental limitations. I want people to escape the expected and ordinary, to escape the regular expectations of a story, and truly step into a different world of literature.

Lionel Suggs

#94. I wanted to show, as Tooly's life enfolds [in The Rise & Fall of Great Powers], how one's earliest stories condition how one encounters the world: what one expects of strangers, whether one counts on justice, whether one veers into cynicism or veers back again.

Tom Rachman

#95. By the way, the Harry Potter series is literature, in spite of what some people might say. The way J.K. Rowling worked that world out is quite something.

Gary Oldman

#96. this grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings....the merry dance of death and trade goes on

Joseph Conrad

#97. When I started writing and illustrating, I knew little of classic children's literature. My stories came from real life, from my concerns about what was happening in the world.

Michael Foreman

#98. Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

Phillips Brooks

#99. Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.

H.G.Wells

#100. I fell even more deeply in love with Tolkien's legendarium after studying Old English literature at uni, as I got a sense of the historical events and cultures that Tolkien used to create his world. My favourite of his imaginary locations is Lothlorien.

Samantha Shannon