#literature

When literature exists, perhaps we do not notice how important it is, but when it does not exist, our lives become coarsened and brutal. For this reason, I am proud of my profession, but also aware of its importance. ↗

— Mo Yan

#am #aware #become #brutal #does

Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics. ↗

— Yevgeny Yevtushenko

#literature #moral #politics #serve

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

— Ellen Glasgow

#both #commands #crude #distorted #life

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause. ↗

— Mao Zedong

#art #cause #classes #detached #fact

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. ↗

— John Updike

#imagery #inspirational #love #lovers #metaphor

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation. ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#indicates #literature #nation

I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come. ↗

— John Green

#believer #big #big believer #classics #cold

I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing. ↗

— Stephen Greenblatt

#actually #else #give #i #i think

Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates. ↗

— Franz Grillparzer

#life #literature #looking #looks #loudly

I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn't a religion major really. ↗

— Maggie Gyllenhaal

#english #english literature #i #independent #literature