A Quote by Alfred Kazin

Is it strange, then, that in a literature so concerned with realism and with personal liberation this refusal and impoverishment of the life of the spirit have always nourished the screamers, the eccentrics, the pseudo-Whitmans, the calculating terrorists?
Sin is a refusal to grow, a refusal to love, a refusal to get committed, to be concerned, and to take risks.
We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This refusal, indeed, is literature's most moral act. At a time when meanings are manifold, disparate, and always changing, the rich possibility of interpretation--the happy resistance of the text to ever be fully known and mastered--is one of the most exhilarating products of human culture.
REFUSAL, n. Denial of something desired; Refusals are graded in a descending scale of finality thus: the refusal absolute, the refusal condition, the refusal tentative and the refusal feminine. The last is called by some casuists the refusal assentive.
If we want to be sincere, we must admit that there is a well-nourished love and an ill-nourished love. And the rest is literature.
A child without an acquaintance of some kind with a classic of literature ... suffers from that impoverishment for the rest of his life. No later intimacy is like that of the first.
The company Liberated People represents just not liberation of different nations around the world; it can be special liberation days. It can be what the company represents and helps highlight someone's personal liberation date.
Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men. As far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.
Art is beauty, and every exposition of art, whether it be music, painting, or the drama, should be subservient to that one great end. As long as nature is a means to the attainment of beauty, so-called realism is necessary and permissable [sic], but it must be realism enhanced by idealism and uplifted by the spirit of an inner life or purpose.
How do we work together? For if we want liberation for women, then we're committed to building a society in which these distances--of class and economics--dissolve, and all our authentic differences--cultures, personalities, sexualities, talents, and aspirations--emerge and are equally nourished.
Of course team spirit and team's strategy matters more than anything else as far as the team is concerned. As far as I am concerned, if the presence of one player is affecting the morale or the spirit of the team, then we might as well rest that player for a while.
Work and life are an interconnected adventure, guided by the heart, winged with spirit, and nourished by the soul.
It is that the Spirit is the outbreathing of God, His inmost life going forth in a personal form to quicken. When we receive the Holy Spirit, we receive the inmost life of God Himself to dwell in a personal way in us. When we really grasp this thought, it is overwhelming in its solemnity. Just stop and think what it means to have the inmost life of that infinite and eternal Being whom we call God, dwelling in a personal way in you. How solemn and how awful and yet unspeakably glorious life becomes when we realize this.
I don't think I have spiritual beliefs in the structured sense - but I believe in the absolute necessity of spirit and a healthy spiritual life. It grew inside me by itself, which is surely the very nature of spirit, and instinctively I protected and nourished it. I also absorbed spirituality by osmosis.
I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.
'No Sweetness Here' is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should: It entertains you.
When I went on 'The Hills,' I never showed my personal life. It was always about my career life - I thought people could take me seriously because they'd see I'm a hard-working girl. Then when I chose to do 'The City,' I took the next step to show my personal life.
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