Literature Quotes - page 75

I grew up believing that the novel has nothing to do with pure literature. So I was taught by scholars. The art of literature, so I was taught, is something devised by men of learning. Out of the brains of scholars came rules to control the rush of genius, that wild fountain which has its source in deepest life. Genius, great or less, is the spring, and art is the sculptured shape, classical or modern, into which the waters must be forced, if scholars and critics were to be served. But the people of China did not so serve. The waters of the genius of story gushed out as they would, however the natural rocks allowed and the trees persuaded, and only common people came and drank and found rest and pleasure. For the novel in China was the peculiar product of the common people. And it was solely their property. (Pearl S. Buck)
Of pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect, free from taint from top to toe, free for ever from headache and dyspepsia, full-blooded, six feet high, a good feeder, never once using medicine, drinking water only-a swimmer in the river or bay or by the seashore- neck open, shirt collar flat and broad, countenance of swarthy transparent red, -face not refined or intellectual, but calm and wholesome-a face of an unaffected animal-a face that absorbs the sunshine and meets savage or gentleman on equal terms-a face of one who eats and drinks and is a brawny lover and embracer -a person singularly beloved and welcomed, especially by young men and mechanics- there you have Walt Whitman, the begetter of a new offspring out of literature... View quote
Walt Whitman
No body of men have ever been so "un-English" as the great Englishmen, Nelson, Shelley, Gladstone: supreme in war, in literature, in practical affairs; yet with no single evidence in the characteristics of their energy that they possess any of the qualities of the English blood. But in submitting to the leadership of such perplexing variations from the common stock, the Englishman is merely exhibiting his general capacity for accepting the universe, rather than for rebelling against it. View quote
Horatio Nelson
On recent and contemporary literature [students'] need is least and our help least. They ought to understand it better than we, and if they do not then there is something radically wrong either with them or with the literature. But I need not labour the point. There is an intrinsic absurdity in making current literature a subject of academic study, and the student who wants a tutor's assistance in reading the works of his own contemporaries might as well ask for a nurse's assistance in blowing his own nose. View quote
C. S. Lewis
The history of the Choctaw Indians has been told before and is still being told, but it has never been told in the way Lafferty tells it ... Hannali is a buffalo bull of a man who should become one of the enduring characters in the literature of the American Indian. View quote
R. A. Lafferty
No true reader who has read as much as a single story by Raphael Aloysius Lafferty needs to be told that he is our most original writer. ... Just about everything Lafferty writes is fun, is witty, is entertaining and playful. But it is not easy, for it is a mingling of allegory with myth, and of both with something more ... In fact, he may not be just ours, but the most original writer in the history of literature. View quote
R. A. Lafferty