Human Beings are Story-Telling Animals

 

Human beings are story-telling animals. Literary study necessarily confronts us with the richness of human experiences, helping us to appreciate common values and the differences between those experiences across cultures, places, and times. Literature shows the design of the creative process, allowing us to interpret the deep motivations of human minds and societies—both in the past and today.

 

Literature Quotes

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.

C. S. Lewis

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

Boris Pasternak

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Virginia Woolf

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

Ezra Pound

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

Toni Morrison

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

Helen Keller

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Mao Zedong

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

E. M. Forster

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

Carlos Fuentes

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

F. Sionil Jose

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, the down trodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men.

George Ripley

 

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

Jhumpa Lahiri