The death penalty not only takes away the life of the person strapped to the table - it takes away a little bit of the humanity in each of us.
Clint SmithRead
The power of literature does not lie in resonance with the particular but the way that the particular speaks to a broader, more universal truth.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Literature's strength comes from its ability to convey universal truths through particular experiences.
Clint Smith's quote emphasizes that the true power of literature is not in the specific details of a story or experience but rather in how these details connect to larger, universal ideas and truths that resonate across different contexts. It suggests that through the particularity of individual narratives, readers can grasp deeper insights about the human experience applicable to all of humanity.
Themes
LiteratureTruthUniversalParticularPower
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a book club discussion to highlight the significance of character experiences in literature.
More from Clint Smith
All quotes βIn an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class, which every student signs at the beginning of the year: read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth.
Clint SmithRead
One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.
Clint SmithRead
History has proven that art depicting black people cannot be disentangled from the political implications that such art has on their lives. As Africans were being stripped from the continent and sailed across the Atlantic to the Western world, depictions of black people in Western art changed in order to further render them racialized caricatures.
Clint SmithRead
Photography, sculpture, and painting were wielded as cultural weapons over the course of generations to substantiate the idea that black people were inherently subordinate beings; they were used to make slavery acceptable and to make black subjugation more palatable.
Clint SmithRead
In my hometown of New Orleans, grief is a public spectacle that, somewhat paradoxically, necessitates celebration. The dead are not mourned so much as they are posthumously venerated with music and dance.
Clint SmithRead
Similar quotes
If you have come to these pages for laughter, may you find it. If you are here to be offended, may your ire rise and your blood boil. If you seek an adventure, may this song sing you away to blissful escape. If you need to test or confirm your beliefs, may you reach comfortable conclusions. All books reveal perfection, by what they are or what they are not. May you find that which you seek, in these pages or outside them. May you find perfection, and know it by name.
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You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.
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I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.
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Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.
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Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.
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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace StevensRead