“Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.”
Source: The Professor (1857), Ch. XIX
“The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten.”
—
Victor Hugo
,
book
Les Misérables
Source: Les Misérables
Last update June 3, 2021.
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Victor Hugo 308
French poet, novelist, and dramatist 1802–1885Related quotes
Eugene V. Debs
(1855–1926) American labor and political leader
The Canton, Ohio Speech, Anti-War Speech (1918)
Context: They are continually talking about your patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches.
And now among other things they are urging you to "cultivate" war gardens, while at the same time a government war report just issued shows that practically 52 percent of the arable, tillable soil is held out of use by the landlords, speculators and profiteers. They themselves do not cultivate the soil. Nor do they allow others to cultivate it. They keep it idle to enrich themselves, to pocket the millions of dollars of unearned increment.
Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Cesare Pavese
(1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator
This Business of Living (1935-1950)
Variant: The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
Source: The Burning Brand: Diaries, 1935-1950
Edith Sitwell
(1887–1964) British poet
Lecture "Young Poets" (1957) published in Mightier Than the Sword: The P.E.N. Hermon Ould Memorial Lectures, 1953-1961 (1964), p. 56
Variants:
Poetry is the deification of reality.
As quoted in Life magazine (4 January 1963)
The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
As quoted in The Beacon Book of Quotations by Women (1992) by Rosalie Maggio, p. 247
Letter XIV
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
Sigmund Freud
(1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis
Source: Reflections on War and Death
Henri Barbusse
(1873–1935) French novelist
Light (1919), Ch. XVI - De Profundis Clamavi
Context: The spectacle of to-morrow is one of agony. Wise men make laughable efforts to determine what may be, in the ages to come, the cause of the inhabited world's end. Will it be a comet, the rarefaction of water, or the extinction of the sun, that will destroy mankind? They have forgotten the likeliest and nearest cause — Suicide.
They who say, "There will always be war," do not know what they are saying. They are preyed upon by the common internal malady of shortsight. They think themselves full of common-sense as they think themselves full of honesty. In reality, they are revealing the clumsy and limited mentality of the assassins themselves.
The shapeless struggle of the elements will begin again on the seared earth when men have slain themselves because they were slaves, because they believed the same things, because they were alike.