4,370 Quotes About Literature

C’est pour l’amour de la liberté qu’il devient « nègre » et se réduit en esclavage : pendant des années, son génie et son nom resteront invisibles dans les ténèbres de la sous-littérature

The white man's cruelest trick was not to conquer or even enslave, but simply to soften, weaken and corrupt every culture or people he encountered until the lost the will to be themselves anymore.

My ideas would burn barbarian stars, topple sectarian gods and raise up empires of liberty and truth.

Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind. You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

A la literatura no hay que ponerle cáscaras ni cerrojos. La ficción debe ser pura libertad.

Critical interventions around race did not destroy the women's movement; it became stronger . . . It shows us that no matter how misguided feminist thinkers have been in the past, the will to change, the will to create the context for struggle and liberation, remains stronger than the need to hold on to wrong beliefs and assumptions.

Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel.

It is rather whenWe gloriously forget ourselves, and plungeSoul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth—’Tis then we get the right good from a book.

Unlike a public performance, such as stand-up comedy, or a live play, reading a book is a very private experience. No one wants to be told what to read, or what they are reading is unsuitable, immoral, racist, sexist, or offensive, as they read a book, in the privacy of their own room. That is why literature will be the last bastion, in the arts at least, of free choice, free speech and free expression.