Representation In Literature Quotes & Sayings

No one we knew ever believed that there was anything between us but the sex and some virulent allure, my dirty dishwater circling the drain of you. Not a pretty comparison but maybe it's the best we'll ever deserve, either of us. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance. — Victor Hugo

Sara Blair's Harlem Crossroads is an important addition to the body of literature that currently exists about Harlem. It brilliantly illuminates the complex relationship between photographic representation and race, and adds new insight into the ways in which this one black community has figured in both the critical and public imaginations. Harlem Crossroads is a tour de force. — Dawoud Bey

Ignorance is a bliss — John Green

I really like crop tops. I like how you can dress them up or down, with jeans or a skirt and heels. I like to be showy and cute. I don't want to be in just a jacket and pants and boots. — McKayla Maroney

During the first seven years, every society tries to condition the mind - and conditioning means nothing but hypnosis: forcing authority, law, tradition, religion, scripture, the priest, the church, into the innermost unconscious of the child so that from there you can control him. — Rajneesh

Faced with the numbering logic of neoliberal regimes, literature offers an intervention in order to consider identity and voice, to consider representation in both the political and artistic sense of the term... [Literature and art] cultivate tension between an unresolved past and present, between invisibility and exposure, showing the dualities of face and mask that leave their trace on identitarian struggles today. — Francine Masiello

Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good. — Plato

We advised them to do what they think proper against the war. — Hanoi Hannah

In his thoughtful and complex style of analysis, Hitler continued on to note the following: "Since the newspapers in question did not enjoy an outstanding reputation ... I regarded them more as the products of anger and envy than the [representation] of a principled, though perhaps mistaken, point of view." In the lines above, we see Hitler begin to wrestle with anti- Semitism, flatly reject religious anti-Semitism as unworthy of Austrian cultural tradition, and suspect that the arguments of the anti-Semitic press and gutter pamphlets were exaggerated beyond credibility by too much subjective and too little objective and principled argument. The view of virtually every Hitler biographer that he based his anti-Semitism on arguments derived from the gutter press and pamphlets of Vienna does not hold up in the face of the words above. To the contrary, we see Hitler take the measure of that literature.

--Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, pp. 103-104 — Russel H.S. Stolfi

Sometimes I think opposable thumbs were invented so teenage girls could use text messaging. — Diane Lane

I would read accounts of so-called battles I had been in, and they had no relation whatever to what had happened. So I began to perceive that anything written was fiction to various degrees. The whole subject
the difference between actuality and representation
was an interesting one. And that's what brought me to literature in the first place. — Paul Fussell

The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor. — Tony Hoagland

It was just an accident; I was never going to come out here. — Dick Van Patten

I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned - mirror of a paradoxical mockery, mirror of the indifference of all public signification. — Jean Baudrillard

Did he use tongue? Did he growl? Was he shirtless? Did he motorboat you? Did you touch his abs? Did you lick his sharp jaw? Is he the size of a horse? Did you giddy up? Did you find his Nemo? Did you Grace his Frankie? Did you Justin his Timberlake? — Brittainy C. Cherry

What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place. — Elif Batuman

The singular power of literature lies not in its capacity for accurate representation of mass commonalities, but its ability to illuminate the individual life in a way that expands our understanding of some previously unseen or unarticulated aspect of existence. — Nicole Krauss

You look at science fiction and look how often it talks about being alien, being alienated about the other. Look at the number of blue people - 'Avatar,' I'm looking at you. And it is now easier to find people of color in science-fiction literature and media, but the issues of representation are still really, really troubling. — Nalo Hopkinson

When you don't have people in your life pushing you, can you push yourself? — Tori Amos

Looking over world literature, it is almost impossible to find a single sympathetic representation of a moneylender- or anyway, a professional moneylender, which means by definition one who charges interest. I'm not sure there is another profession (executioners?) with such a consistently bad image. It's especially remarkable when one considers that unlike executioners, usurers often rank among the richest and most powerful people in their communities. Yet the very name, "usurer," evokes images of loan sharks, blood money, pounds of flesh, the selling of souls, and behind them all, the Devil, often represented as himself a kind of usurer, an evil accountant with his books and ledgers. — David Graeber

Men destroy only what they fear. — Marion Zimmer Bradley

The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one's bidding. — Minae Mizumura