“DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.”
Ambrose Bierce
“Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
Mark Twain
“When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.”
Anais Nin
“In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.”
George Bernard Shaw
“[The literary figure who looms largest in] False Papers ... perfected a language ... and a vision that gave memory an introspection and aesthetic scope and magnitude no author had conferred on either before. He allowed intimacy itself to become an art form.”
Marcel Proust
“Now if we allow our living language to die out, it is almost a certainty that we condemn our literary records to remain in obscurity.”
Douglas Hyde
