The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Margaret Atwood
About This Quote

This quote is best applied in the context of literary criticism. The answer to a particular question is determined by the kind of questions you ask. If you read literature, and try to analyze it, you will learn more about literature than just the plot. You will also learn about the author’s reasons behind writing in that genre. The answers one gets in life are determined in large part by the questions one asks.

Some Similar Quotes
  1. A half-read book is a half-finished love affair. - David Mitchell
  2. If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open,... - Italo Calvino
  3. We shouldn't teach great books we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement. - B.F. Skinner
  4. Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live. - Gustave Flaubert
  5. People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. - Logan Pearsall Smith
More Quotes By Margaret Atwood
  1. I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.
  2. Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed...
  3. How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
  4. A truth should exist, it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?
  5. Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.
Related Topics