Express Quotes (page 52)
Johnson, who defines poetry as 'metrical composition', defines poet as 'An inventor; an author of fiction; a writer of poems; one who writes in measure'. We can gauge how far we have traveled by comparing this with the Shorter Oxford Dictionary which, after a definition very like Johnson's, feels obligated to add 'A writer in verse (or sometimes in elevated prose) distinguished by imaginative power, insight, sensibility, and faculty of expression'.
C. S. Lewis
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into whichhe has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records ofother people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness isthe only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts fordata, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called...
Aldous Huxley
Rules cease to exist once they have outlived their value, but forms live on eternally. There are forms of the novel which impose on the suggested topic all the virtues of the Number. Born of the very expression and of the diverse aspects of the tale, connected by nature with the guiding idea, daughter and mother of all the elements that it polarizes, a structure develops, which transmits to the works the last reflections of Universal Light and the last echoes of the Harmony of Worlds.
Raymond Queneau
That was morality ; things that made you disgusted afterwards. No, that must be immorality. That was a large statement. What a lot of bilge I could think up at night. What rot ! I could hear Brett say it. What rot ! When you were with the English you got into the habit of using English expressions in your thinking.
Ernest Hemingway