The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the motions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
Isaac Bashevis Singer in New York Times Magazine (26 November 1978)
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Related quotes
The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual -- when it begins to ignore the passions, the motions -- it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
quote by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
quote by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Oh The Poems
OH THE POEMS AND THE POEMS AND THE POEMS
Oh the poems and the poems and the poems
Oh the love of Literature
Oh all that stuff
I have given my life to-
Words and meanings and feelings
Pages and pages and pages –
What it is all this literary life for?
When out the window out the door
With our eyes we see in an instant other worlds other dreams?
I don’t know and I will never know
And Literature is certainly far more than I can say it is-
Oh the poems and this poem and this day turning grey
And all my life old and old and more old and more old-
Oh why oh why oh why
And always back to God
My last rescue and refuge and escape
I who have read so much Great Literature
And can only write this-
Oh the why and the oh oh oh and the words
And the whole world of Literature
I would belong to and do not.
Oh the words oh the world oh the Literature
Oh God help me please can’t you please help me a little or not?
poem by Shalom Freedman
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Literature I Loved
LITERATURE I LOVED
Literature I loved-
Reading gave new lives and new worlds-
Experience enriched beyond
What I could have ever have imagined alone-
The pleasure and joy of it
The discovery the adventure-
Literature I loved
And Life greater because of it.
poem by Shalom Freedman
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Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.
quote by Marilyn Hacker
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The purblind majority quite honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic human life, and that it did so. And in consequence, their love-affairs, their maxims, their so-called natural ties and instincts, and above all, their wickedness, became just so many bungling plagiarisms from something they had read, in a novel or a Bible or a poem or a newspaper. People progressed from the kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without noticing that it was in reality something quite different. Human life was a distorting tarnished mirror held up to literature: this much at least of Wilde's old paradox — that life mimicked art — was indisputable. Human life,
very clumsily, tried to reproduce the printed word.
quote by James Branch Cabell
Submitted by Veronica Serbanoiu
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In the same period, Polish literature also underwent some significant changes. From social-political literature, which had a great tradition and strong motivation to be that way, Polish literature changed its focus to a psychological rather than a social one.
quote by Andrzej Wajda
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Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.
quote by Francoise Sagan
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A Gimmick
gimmick literature this just it's
just is gimmick a this
is not literature it's just
not just a literature this
gimmick just a it's not
this is not literature it's
poem by John Thorkild Ellison
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In French literature, you can choose a la carte; in Spanish literature, there is only the set meal.
quote by Jose Bergamin
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.
quote by Manuel Puig
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For Mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.
quote by Thomas Bulfinch
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The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
quote by Vaclav Havel
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Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.
quote by Gertrude Stein
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As society diversifies, the number of people who read literature is decreasing. It will be difficult for readers to digest my ideas through literature.
In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern.
quote by Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
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SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.
quote by Piers Anthony
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The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.
quote by Charles Horton Cooley
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Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.
quote by John Cheever
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.
quote by Francis Ford Coppola
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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