Formalist Literary Quotes & Sayings

Perceiving your own voice means perceiving your true self or nature. When you and the sound become one, you don't hear the sound; you are the sound. — Seung Sahn

Family is the nucleus unit of any society. Although modern science allows us to create life in a petri dish, I believe God designed humans - like all other animals - to be born of a male and a female union in the context of family according to His divine plan for our spiritual development. Family grounds us and grows us. We first learn how to relate to others through our family relationships. We learn to change and adapt according to the needs of our family. For instance, a mother will notice the subtle moves and shiftings of her baby in her womb. As the baby squirms and moves about, the mother will adjust her body to make the baby more comfortable. Sometimes I think back to the days when I carried my own babies. Tending to their tiniest needs, I began to understand that God tends to our smallest needs just as well. — Taffi Dollar

What one gains in technique can lead to deforestation in the writing that is both good and bad. Keep the energy and the willingness to proceed stupidly. — Nancy Zafris

I have friends that are very wealthy, and I said, do you get audited? They don't even know what I'm talking about. They have never been audited. Why am I audited every single year? And until the audit is completed, obviously, I wouldn't show anything. I will show it as soon as it's completed. I have nothing to hide. — Donald Trump

The 1980s witnessed radical advances in the theorisation of the study of literature in the universities. It had begun in France in the 1960s and it made a large impact on the higher education establishments of Britain and America. New life was breathed into psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, while structuralism gave way to post-structuralism. The stability of the text as a focus of study was challenged by deconstruction, a theory developed by the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, which represented a complete fracture with the old liberal-formalist mode of reading. Coherence and unity were seen as illusory and readers were liberated to aim at their own meanings. Hardy's texts were at the centre of these theoretical movements, including one that came to prominence in the 1980s, feminism. — Geoffrey Harvey

Script for an actor is like a bible. You carry it with you, you read it over and over, you go to your passages. — Cameron Diaz

An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious. — Susan Sontag

Susie Waggoner in 'Miami Blues' is just such a sweetheart, such an innocent. When I watch that, I really feel like I'm watching Susie Waggoner. I don't really see myself. And there's a simplicity to it that I really like. — Jennifer Jason Leigh

No matter what Donald Trump says, it's clear that global warming is rapidly changing conditions on our planet. — Elizabeth Kolbert

A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I believe in the literal rising of the body of Christ. It's the cornerstone of my Christian faith. — Francis Collins

He who seeks pleasure with reference to himself, not others, will ever find that pleasure is only another name for discontent. — Letitia Elizabeth Landon

The next time you see a person with a composed face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the power of quiet. — Susan Cain

Trees acquire strength by growing slowly and flexing with the pressures of nature. Us too ... — Gene Simmons

What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism . — Terry Eagleton

I did a lot of thrift and vintage. I would mix those pieces into some of the more inexpensive items from Express, Gap, Old Navy, and Clothestime. — Katy Perry