#literature

A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can. ↗

— Edith Hamilton

#great #historical #knowledge #literature #people

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. ↗

— Sarah Orne Jewett

#down #gets #great #itself #last

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead. ↗

— Sinclair Lewis

#clear #cold #dead #like #literature

It has always seemed to me a pity that the young people of our generation should grow up with such scant knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, its wealth and variety, its freshness and its imperishable quality. ↗

— James Loeb

#freshness #generation #greek #grow #grow up

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is. ↗

— David McCullough

#art #being #civic #enlargement #experience

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting. ↗

— Michael Ondaatje

#toronto #toronto-literature #imagination

For those of us who take literature very seriously, picking up a work of fiction is the start of an adventure comparable in anticipatory excitement to what I imagine is felt by an athlete warming up for a competition, a mountain climber preparing for the ascent: it is the beginning of a process whose outcome is unknown, one that promises the thrill and elation of success but may as easily end in bitter disappointment. Committed readers realize at a certain point that literature is where we have learned a good part of the little we know about living. ↗

— Edith Grossman Why Translation Matters

#literature-in-translation #imagination

That was always my fear, that perhaps books would lead me astray, teaching me about a life that didn’t match reality. ↗

— Stefanos Livos

#imagination #literature #reality #stories #teach

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while. ↗

— W.B. Yeats

#hope #literature #memory #poetry #art

Although there is a very large literature, still growing almost daily, on the Chinese calendar, its interest is, we suggest, much more archaeological and historical than scientific. ↗

— Joseph Needham

#although #archaeological #calendar #chinese #daily