Literature Quotes

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

Lionel Trilling

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

Ellen Glasgow

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

Robert Louis Stephenson

We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.

Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (1979)

Literature is news that stays news.

Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934) chapter 8

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.

John Burroughs, The Snow - Walkers

Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson