Quotes on Literature

The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.

These decrees of yours are no different from spiders' webs. They'll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they'll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth.

The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.

What I wanted to do was use literature and different kinds of stories and poems as a springboard, tapping into the creativity of our teens - I wanted teenagers to come up with their own creative responses to literature - using books themselves as a starting point.

You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.

At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.

It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association

There is a courtesy of the heart; it is allied to love. From its springs the purest courtesy in the outward behavior.

If the religious experience were simply some naive impression of the uninformed it would not have resulted in such intellectual insight, such spiritual exaltation, such spectacular religious ritual, or in the immense volume of song and poetry and literature and dance that humans have produced.

The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.

I saw within Its depth how It conceives_x000D_ _x000D_ All things in a single volume bound by Love_x000D_ _x000D_ of which the universe is the scattered leaves.

There are moments in life, when the heart is so full of emotion That if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble Drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret, Spilt on the ground like water, can never be gathered together.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

As a young writer, I was on guard against the Latina in me, the Spanish in me because as far as I could see the models that were presented to me did not include my world. In fact, 'I was told by one teacher in college that one could only write poetry in the language in which one first said Mother. That left me out of American literature, for sure.

Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.

Self-knowledge comes from knowing other men.