Asked Quote by Joanna Scott

“Through engagement with others, literature lets us imagine what it would be like to be different.”

— Anonymous

In literature, you know only what you imagine

— Carlos Fuentes

We are what we imagine ourselves to be.

— Anonymous

“I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like…

— Kate Zambreno

To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last…

— Eudora Welty

To imagine myself in different ways comes from my beginnings in the theatre. People are more accepting when you go 'apparently', 'wildly' afield from…

— Meryl Streep

The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and…

— Salman Rushdie

“Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in…

— Harold Bloom

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

— Harold Bloom

I have this belief that we are so vulnerable when we open ourselves up to literature. We're reminded of these real parts of ourselves.

— Tracy K. Smith

Through engagement with others, literature lets us imagine what it would be like to be differe.

— Denis Donoghue

“When we stop thinking primarily about ourselves, of our wants, our image and our own self-preservation, we undergo a transformation of truly heroic proportions.”

— José N. Harris