“Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn't escape or withdraw from life either: it swallows it.”
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
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Northrop Frye 137
Canadian literary critic and literary theorist 1912–1991Related quotes
“Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.”
Oscar Wilde
(1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
“Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.”
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“If art reflects life, it does so with special mirrors.”
¶ 73
A Short Organum for the Theatre (1949)
“He who does not reflect his life back to God in gratitude does not know himself.”
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Source: Reverence for Life: The Words of Albert Schweitzer
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“Morality and literature,” pp. 161-162
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)
Context: It is not only in literature that fiction generates immorality. It does it also in life itself. For the substance of our life is almost exclusively composed of fiction. We fictionalize our future, and, unless we are heroically devoted to truth, we fictionalize our past, refashioning it to our taste. We do not study other people; we invent what they are thinking, saying, and doing. Reality provides us with some raw material, just as novelists often take a theme from a news item, but we envelop it in a fog in which, as in all fiction, values are reversed, so that evil is attractive and good is tedious.
Jean Cocteau
(1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker
Diary of an Unknown (1988), On Invisibility
Context: Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal... unnable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort, the trifling feeling of escape experienced at a masked ball. He distances himself from that which he feels and sees. He invents. He transfigures. He mythifies. He creates. He fancies himself an artist. He imitates, in his small way, the painters he claims are mad.
“the only escape from the miseries of life are music and cats…”
Albert Einstein
(1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity