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Literature Quotes and Quotations
 I am never long, even in the society of her I love, without yearning for the company of my lamp and my library.  The walls are the publishers of the poor. A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one. Chaucer, I confess, is a rough diamond; and must be polished e'er he shines. I can find my biography in every fable that I read. Literature is mostly about sex and not much about having children; and life is the other way around. Literature is my utopia. Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once. Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade: today it is the reverse. Oh! Let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about. Science is uneasy with beginnings. Mythology is concerned above all with what happened "in the beginning". Its signature is "Once upon a time". The first thing to be done by a biographer in estimating character is to examine the stubs of the victim's cheque books. The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, with an indolent expression and an undulating throat like an unsuccessful literary man. The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms. Those expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in the family. What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it, dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it! When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he's gone through, it means he was born for literature. When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language. Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition. The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him, and when he is compelled to exist, as it were, by his own inner light. A novel is a mirror carried along a main road. - Stendhal A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man - the biography of the man himself cannot be written. What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul. A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially. Literature is a power to be possessed, not a body of objects to be studied. Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. A perfect judge will read each word of wit with the same spirit that its author writ. In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage. To be a good diarist, one must have a little snouty, sneaky mind. Published memoirs indicate the end of a man's activity, and that he acknowledges the end. It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion. The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it. All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them. Contemporary literature can be classified under three headings: the neurotic, the erotic and the tommy-rotic. - W. Giese Literature is the orchestration of platitudes. Medicine is my lawful wife. Literature is my mistress. One hears about life all the time from different people with very different narrative gifts. The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. The answers you get from literature depend upon the questions you pose. The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine. Biography is one of the new terrors of death. A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand. In literature as in love we are astounded by what is chosen by others. Good children's literature appeals not only to the child in the adult, but to the adult in the child. Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art. The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible. The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time. Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine. The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read. 
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