Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 6 “Origins and Miracles” (p. 162)
“Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject — there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.”
Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)
Context: Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use — high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject — there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject — there is only one subject: What it feels like to…" by Richard Rodríguez?
Richard Rodríguez 127
American journalist and essayist 1944Related quotes
Giordano Bruno
(1548–1600) Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer
As translated by Arthur Imerti (1964)
The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (1584)
“Our leaders invent nothing but new taxes, and conquer nothing but the pockets of their subjects.”
Thomas Hodgskin
(1787–1869) British writer
Source: The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832), p. 14
“Nothing is so loved by tyrants as obedient subjects.”
Clarence Darrow
(1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union
John Steinbeck
(1902–1968) American writer
Radio interview (1939) quoted in Introduction by Robert DeMott to a 1992 edition of The Grapes of Wrath
Context: Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present-day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor … And since our race admires gallantry, the writer will deal with it where he finds it. He finds it in the struggling poor now.
“This whole universe, with all its vastness, grandeur and beauty, is nothing but sheer imagination.”
Meher Baba
(1894–1969) Indian mystic
Message in Bombay (October 1922), p. 431.
Lord Meher (1986)
Context: This whole universe, with all its vastness, grandeur and beauty, is nothing but sheer imagination. In spite of so many discoveries, researches and scientific knowledge, the creation remains a great unsolved riddle.
“Taxation is nothing but organized robbery, and there the subject should be dropped.”
Frank Chodorov
(1887–1966) American libertarian thinker
Source: The Economics of Society, Government, and State (1946), p. 116.
“Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.”
Northrop Frye
(1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist
"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction