The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. On this subject I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti. . Dietrich Bonhoeffer
About This Quote

French writer Victor Hugo was commenting on the state of literature at the time, which he saw as being oversaturated with cheap sentiment. By this he meant that there was no quality to the works he was reading, which were mostly written by people who had never experienced great tragedy in their lives. Instead, they wrote about how they felt sorry for themselves and how bad life was.

Source: Letters And Papers From Prison

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