Literature Quotes

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All art is a revolt against man's fate.
Andre Malraux /Voices of Silence /

Literature and history, these two great branches of human learning, records of human behaviour, human thought, are less and less valued by the young, and by educators, too. Yet from them one may learn how to be a citizen and a human being. We may learn how to look at ourselves and at the society we live in, in that calm, cool, critical and sceptical way which is the only possible stance for a civilized human being, or so have said all the philosophers and the sages.
Doris Lessing

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The demand that stories must be “about” something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers.
Doris Lessing