Quotes on Literature

“When we are at play, or looking at a painting or a stature, or reading a story, the imaginary work must have such an effect on us that it enlarges our own sense of reality.”

~Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water

“Students value literature as a means of enlarging their knowledge of the world, because through literature they acquire not so much additional information as additional experience.”

~Marie Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration

“Literature… serves to deepen and to extend human greatness through the nurture of beauty, understanding, and compassion. In none of these ways, of course, can literature, unless it be the literature of the Christian faith, lead us to the City of God, but it may make our life in the city of man far more a thing of joy and meaning and humanity, and that in itself is no small achievement. Great literature may not be a Jacob’s ladder by which we can climb to heave, but it provides an invaluable staff with which to walk the earth.”

~Roland M. Frye, Perspectives on Man: Literature and the Christian Tradition

“Art is one of the means by which man grabbles with and assimilates reality.”

~Ralph Fox, The Novel and the People

“The primary job that any writer faces is to tell you a story of human experience—I mean by that, universal mutual experience, the anguishes and troubles and gifts of the human heart, which is universal, without regard to race or time or condition.”

~William Faulkner, Faulkner at West Point

“A poem… begins in delight and ends in wisdom [and]… a clarification of life… For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew… There is a glad recognition of the long lost.”

~Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes”

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See Leland Ryken, The Christian Imagination