A Quote by Edwidge Danticat

We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.

Edwidge Danticat

Quote Topics

Because Fully Good Good Literature Human Know Literature Need Ourselves Without

Quote Author

Edwidge Danticat
Haitian - Novelist
Born: January 19, 1969

South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less-than-fully-human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.

J. M. Coetzee

I believe we need literature, which, by allowing us to experience more fully, to imagine more fully, enables us to live more freely.

Phyllis Rose

What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been. We need such a map desperately, we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge we will not survive.

Margaret Atwood

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.

Marjorie Garber

It's also helpful to realize that this very body that we have, that's sitting right here right now... with its aches and it pleasures... is exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive.

Pema Chodron

Instead of educating the I.Q., we need to educate the H.Q., the heart quotient, the matters of truth, love, justice, and compassion. There are two ways to do this. One is through the read life experiences and the other is through literature. Literature has the power to take us outside ourselves and returns to ourselves a changed self.

Jim Trelease

We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, and intellectually. We need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.

C. S. Lewis

Designers need to be more than ambassadors, they need to be fully functioning and fully aware members of strategic decision-making teams in a company.

Nathan Shedroff

In journalism, if there's a hole in your story you figure out a way around it because you've got a 4 p.m. deadline. It's a neat skill to have but it's deadly for literature. In literature, you need to stare at that hole, not ignore it. You need to figure it out.

Achy Obejas

The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.

C. S. Lewis

We need to fall, and we need to be aware of it; for if we did not fall, we should not know how weak and wretched we are of ourselves, nor should we know our Maker's marvellous love so fully.

Julian of Norwich

Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious.

Paul Auster

To be fully human is perhaps why I'm Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human.

Barbara Brown Taylor

I know how to deal with jet lag, and I know just how much rest I need and when I need to take naps. When you walk on stage, you need your brain working at its highest and most fully-functioning, so it's not always easy, but I sort of figure it out.

Joshua Bell

Literature has low enough standards. But we can avoid writing the worst literature if we make ourselves ask ourselves, every two or three sentences we write, 'Is that what I really think?'

Carol Bly

In my profession it isn’t a question of telling good literature from bad. Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money — it’s always been like that. What do I, an agent, get out of a literary genius who won’t be discovered for another hundred years? I’ll be dead myself then. Successful incompetents are what I need.

Walter Moers

A Quote by Edwidge Danticat

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors