What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place.
Sometimes two people have to fall apart, to realize how much they need to fall back together.
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Colleen Hoover
What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.
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Graham Greene
The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by...
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Oscar Wilde
The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on...
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Brent Weeks
Personal experience is the basis of all real literature.
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George Henry Lewis
More Quotes By Elif Batuman
Why was "plain" a euphemism for "ugly, " when the very hallmark of human beauty was its plainness, the symmetry and simplicity that always seemed so young and so innocent. It was impossible not to think that here beauty was one of the most important...
You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things--and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that's the wonderful gift right there.
Most people, the minute they meet you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out...
What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place.
It was hard to decide on a literature course. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that 19th century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were...
