#literature

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues. ↗

— Phillips Brooks

#before #blooms #comes #full #hills

All literature is political. ↗

— LeVar Burton

#political

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature. ↗

— Willa Cather

#down #gets #great #itself #last

Lastly, literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist. ↗

— Morris Raphael Cohen

#both #distressing #frequency #idols #lastly

If you have a big heart, you will live a large life. ↗

— Yvonne Jayne

#literature #philosophy #writing #life

A stubborn refusal of the conditions of 20th Century 'reality', surrealism has denied intransigently and consistently that modern man can live without a sense of wonder at the world that was once embodied in myth. In approaching literature, it has aimed at restoring to the word its magical qualities. And at giving back to language the elemental power it once had within society. This determinism lies at the heart of the surrealist attitude and distinguishes it radically from the modernism which took shape contemporaneously with it. ↗

— Michael Richardson

#literature #magic #modernism #myth #surrealism

Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience. ↗

— Carl Clinton Van Doren

#actual #brought #curious #experience #facts

The Brightness of her cheek would shame those stars as daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven would through the airy region stream so bright that birds would sing, and think it were not night. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#beauty #beauty-in-literature #beauty

Camp fires, like red, peculiar blossoms, dotted the night. ↗

— Stephen Crane

#courage

It appeared that the swift wings of their desires would have shattered against the iron gates of the impossible. ↗

— Stephen Crane

#courage