#literature

There is no valid reason for the perennial Christian preference of biography, history, and the newspaper to fiction and poetry. The former tell us what happened, while literature tells us what happens. The example of the Bible, which is central to any attempt to formulate a Christian approach to literature, sanctions the imagination as a valid form of truth. The Bible is in large part a work of imagination. Its most customary way of expressing truth is not the sermon or the theological outline, but the story, the poem, and the vision--all of them literary forms and products of the imagination (though not necessarily the fictional imagination). Literary conventions are present in the Bible from start to finish, even in the most historically factual parts. ↗

— Leland Ryken

#faith

Every man's memory is his private literature. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#his #literature #man #memory #private

[P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally. Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate—whether the inspiring writings of the Bible or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama. ↗

— Bart D. Ehrman

#intelligence #life #literature #religion #inspirational

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

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

— Yvonne Jayne

#literature #philosophy #writing #life

أي فن من الفنون يجب أن يحمل معه فكر. سواء كان الفكر أو الرسالة فلسفية أو اجتماعية أو عقائدية، دون أن يتخذ ذلك نبرة عالية زاعقة مباشرة يظهر الفن فيها بمظهر الوسيلة الثانوية. الفن متعة قبل كل شيء. إن لم تستطع إمتاعي فلن تستطيع إقناعي ↗

— توفيق الحكيم

#criticism #literature #art

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

I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature. ↗

— David Eddings

#american literature #back #bad #bad back #by the time

I took two fiction-writing courses in college and majored in literature. I felt that I had a knack though I wouldn't go so far as to call it a talent. But it scared me. I felt it was a childish thing wanting to write and that I would forget about it eventually. ↗

— Ben Fountain

#call #childish #college #courses #eventually