“The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.”

— Italo Calvino

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utm…" by Italo Calvino?

Italo Calvino photo

Italo Calvino 44

Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels 1923–1985

Related quotes

“Facts are not science — as the dictionary is not literature.”

Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962) American university teacher (1879-1962)

Fischerisms (1944)

“The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Source: Le Potomak : Précédé d'un Prospectus 1916

“A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”

John Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn

Stanza 1
Poems (1820), Ode on a Grecian Urn
Context: Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape?
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

“While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.”

Cyril Connolly (1903–1974) British author

Source: The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn't escape or withdraw from life either: it swallows it.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

“The literature of former days is like watching a fire from across the water; in present-day literature, the author himself is being scorched by the fire and he is bound to feel it deeply, and when he begins to feel it deeply, he is bound to take part in the social struggle.”

Lu Xun (1881–1936) Chinese novelist and essayist

35
"The Epigrams of Lusin"

“The writer is an ordinary man, not a spokesman for the people, and that literature can only be the voice of one individual. Writing that becomes an ode to a country, the standard of a nation, the voice of a party… loses its nature—it is no longer literature. Writers do not set out to be published, but to know themselves. Although Kafka or Pessoa resorted to language, it was not in order to change the world. I, myself, believe in what I call cold literature: a literature of flight for one's life, a literature that is not utilitarian, but a spiritual self-preservation in order to avoid being stifled by society. I believe in a literature of the moment, for the living. You have to know how to use freedom. If you use it in exchange for something else, it vanishes.”

Gao Xingjian (1940) Chinese novelist and playwright

Interview by Jean-Luc Douin http://web.archive.org/web/20130421061108/http://my.opera.com/PRC/blog/?startidx=560

“The original dispute was one of poetic diction… From an interest in the minor problem of poetic diction I was led to see that the problem was really one of a suitable medium for all branches of Chinese literature. The question now became: In what language shall the New China produce its future literature? My answer was: The classical language, so long dead, can never be the medium of a living literature of a living nation; the future literature of China must be written in the living language of the people. "No dead language can produce a living literature." And the living language I proposed as the only possible medium of the future literature of China, was the pei-hau, the vulgar tongue of the vast majority of the population, the language which, in the last 500 years, had produced the numerous novels read and loved by the people, though despised by the men of letters. I wanted this much despised vulgar tongue of the people and the novels to be elevated to the position of the national language of China, to the position enjoyed by all the modern national languages in Europe.”

Hu Shih (1891–1962) Chinese philosopher, essayist and diplomat

The Chinese Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), p. 50

Related topics