Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My mother's father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay's 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I'd be Horatius keeping the bridge.
There's no shortage of orphans in 19th-century literature, but it's hard to find a single happy, communicative, functional parental relationship in the whole of 'Great Expectations,' even among the minor characters.
Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing.
It seems to me to make as much sense to talk about literature as a large-scale human phenomenon without bringing in evolution as it does to engage in cosmology while you're thinking the universe is still geocentric.
If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people.
Solving Problems with NMR Spectroscopy is a very welcome addition to the existing literature. It fulfills a real need for an up-to-date and authoritatively written introduction for students and practitioners of NMR.
As a writer I have persisted in my uncertainty, alternating between novels which could charitably be considered literature and world reporting which by another stretch of objective standards might be called history.
I think the genre of comics sometimes overtakes the medium, and people assume that they are kind of frivolous. If you have a good, strong story teller, they can be as affecting as any character in literature. Period.
I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did.
Miss Caroline seemed unaware that the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature.
Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and 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.
I can cite a chapter and verse of literature at the times saying Italians don`t speak our language, these folks coming from other places - it sounds identical to what you are saying about Muslims now. It really does.
"And they lived happily ever after" is one of the most tragic sentences in literature. It's tragic because it's falsehood. It is a myth that has led generations to expect something from marriage that is not possible.
The history of literature is the history of the human mind. It is, as compared with other histories, the intellectual as distinguished from the material, the informing spirit as compared with the outward and visible.
Less than 8 percent of private sector workers belonged to a union in 2004, and, overall, only 12.5 percent of American workers carry a union card - down from about one-third of workers in labor's heydays in the 1950s.
Literature ultimately helps one to ground a deeper and wider outlook. An over-directed life without the inner resource to step outside of itself is closed to other beauties and the complexities of character and world.
I read everything. When I say everything, I read everything: children's literature, Y.A., science fiction, fantasy, romance - I read it all. Each genre fulfills a different need I have. Each book teaches me something.
Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.
There's a wealth of literature out there which, hopefully, will be, you know, exploded in the future, and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling, and sort of legendary characters.
When I got to college I simply decided that I could speak French, because I just could not spend any more time in French classes. I went ahead and took courses on French literature, some of them even taught in French.
The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.
Literature gives us a window into other people's experiences in other places, in other times, so I thought it would be really interesting to investigate how different people had written about motherhood, and childhood.
The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow.
Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has and never will. Show me the exact amount of wrong and injustices that are visited upon a person and I will show you the exact amount of words endured by these people.
Because it's my first language, all the literature that I've read and all the things that I've been inspired by that have been written in Welsh have moved me beyond anything that I've experienced in any other language.
I like having a paperback original. And until literature catches up with the culture - the violence, language, syntax, compression, concision, complexity and diversity that the Internet offers - books still make sense.
The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
The more consciously democratic Americans became, however, the less they were satisfied with a conception of the Promised Land, which went no farther than a pervasive economic prosperity guaranteed by free institutions.
The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint.
I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd find it an extremely difficult conflict because I'd be basically disinclined to accept.
Infectious diseases introduced with Europeans, like smallpox and measles, spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themselves, and killed an estimated 95% of the New World's Indian population.
As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.
Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely; in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest.
I'm addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things - being able to buy a book on the internet that you can't find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources.
If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?
It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.
The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. If you have formed...literary taste...your life will be one long ecstasy of denying that the world is a dull place.
The multiculturalism of Britain is one of our greatest strengths in music, literature, and visual art, but the TV and film industry doesn't tap into the multicultural talent pool in the U.K. as much as they do in the U.S.
When we have spiritual reading at meals, when we have the rosary at night, when we have study groups, forums, when we go out to distribute literature at meetings, or sell it on the street corners, Christ is there with us.
First of all, the novel should be a critique of the novels that have come before it in a language that broadens the audience of American literature. Second, it's really got to be invested in a number of what-if questions.
When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years.
Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, - for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it - not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation.
I believe that by releasing "passing interest/low keepsake-value literature" from the burden of physicality, you are actually releasing the words from their worst liability: the price and inconvenience of actual bookness.
I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.
Though dissenters seem to question everything in sight, they are actually bundles of dusty answers and never conceived a new question. What offends us most in the literature of dissent is the lack of hesitation and wonder.
I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.
Well the wedding in the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury was a fairy tale and there was a huge public impress, investment of goodwill, affection and indeed money in this Institution. It was a huge success at the time.
The ideal reasoner, he remarked, would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.