Literary Quotations, in Context - Yenra

Explore forty literary guides through sourced quotations, close readings and named translations, with paths through attention, ethical decisions, speaking voices, narrative and interpretation.

A memorable line is an opening. Follow it into the work it came from: the voice speaking, the thought taking shape, the scene around it.

One line. A larger conversation.

All art is quite useless.

Oscar Wilde · The Picture of Dorian Gray, Preface (1891)

What does “useless” mean in an argument about art? Follow the provocation into its setting, then compare it with Wilde’s ideas about perception and sincerity.

Start with Wilde
Conceptual illustration of a sculptural form, a frame and their reflection.

Begin with a question

How does a thought become a decision?

Follow Camus’s question and stated answer, then trace Woolman’s reflection and refusal.

What does an observer add to a scene?

Read Symons’s impressions and suggestions, then examine Brown’s uncertain narrator.

What can two stories share?

Compare roles and relationships with Todorov, then revisit speech and implication in Browning.

Read in context

Forty guides pair short passages with source notes, interpretation and questions to carry into your reading. English translations name the translator.

  • Virginia Woolf

    How experience becomes a story

    Follow perception and memory through Modern Fiction, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.

  • Oscar Wilde

    Art, paradox and sincerity

    Read three provocations within the arguments, dialogues and circumstances that give them force.

  • Willa Cather

    What fiction leaves unsaid

    Explore implication, happiness and belonging through an essay and two novels.

  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

    The work of imagination

    Distinguish imagination, poetic faith and symbol, then follow a poem’s changing attention.

  • Matsuo Bashō

    Learning to notice

    Read a reported teaching and two poems with named translators and close-reading questions.

  • William Blake

    Contraries, perception and unanswered questions

    Read the provocations of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell alongside two poems from Songs of Experience.

  • Aristotle

    Poetry, character and a good life

    Follow connected arguments about living well, repeated action and the shape of a plot.

  • Anton Chekhov

    Observation and the writer’s judgment

    Read three letters in Constance Garnett’s translation, with dates, recipients and a writing exercise.

  • Bildungsroman

    Reading a novel of formation

    Trace changing judgment and independent choice through Great Expectations and Jane Eyre.

  • Happiness

    Four passages, four different questions

    Compare Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Helen Keller and Willa Cather in their original settings.

  • Charlotte Brontë

    Read Jane Eyre and Shirley through sourced passages on emotional imagery, self-respect and the distance between a character and a narrator.

  • Robert Browning

    Follow the Duke’s speech in My Last Duchess through three sourced excerpts, with a practical method for distinguishing statement, implication and interpretation.

  • Writing an Autobiography

    Turn a remembered event into a clear autobiographical scene, using Franklin and Douglass as reading examples and a practical draft-and-check exercise.

  • Chinese Poetry

    Read three Chinese poems in Arthur Waley’s named translations, with exact source locations and a method for following imagery, tone and translation choices.

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Read Emerson through three sourced passages on independent judgment, the experience of nature and creative reading, with context and practical questions.

  • Reader Participation

    Use Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart to distinguish evidence from inference, test two interpretations and examine how a story recruits a reader’s judgment.

  • Boethius

    Follow three stages of Boethius’s dialogue with Philosophy, with H. R. James’s translation, book references and a method for testing the argument about happiness.

  • T. S. Eliot

    Read Tradition and the Individual Talent through three sourced excerpts and a comparison exercise that tests Eliot’s account of how works change one another.

  • Jorge Luis Borges

    Read Borges and I in Ilan Stavans’s translation, follow an invented premise into its consequences and keep author, narrator and fictional authority distinct.

  • Friedrich Nietzsche

    Read four Nietzsche excerpts with exact work, section and translator credits, using a practical method for examining paradox, imagery and a fictional speaking voice.

  • Literary Anecdotes

    Trace a literary anecdote through its sources, distinguish evidence from retelling, and cite a memorable story without overstating what is known.

  • Emily Brontë

    Read two window scenes in Wuthering Heights while tracking who speaks, who remembers and who controls the account.

  • Joseph Conrad

    Separate the young sailor, the older storyteller and the listening company in Conrad’s Youth, a Narrative.

  • The Aesthetic Movement

    Explore art for art’s sake through Pater’s attention to experience, Wilde’s provocations and the Aesthetic Movement’s visual culture.

  • W. H. Auden

    Read Auden’s account of poetic craft beside In Memory of W. B. Yeats, and distinguish a poem’s effects from a poet’s public authority.

  • William Faulkner

    Follow the opening of The Sound and the Fury by tracking companions, sensations and time shifts, then compare Faulkner’s account of a writer’s knowledge.

  • Charles Baudelaire

    Read “Windows” and “The Eyes of the Poor” by separating visible details, imagined lives and spoken responses in Arthur Symons’s translation.

  • James Boswell

    Read Boswell’s July 16, 1763 journal entry by distinguishing reported advice, remembered conversation and reflection on the record itself.

  • Animals in Literature

    Compare Poe’s cat, Blake’s tiger and Sewell’s speaking horses to see how narration, imagery and projection shape literary animals.

  • Roland Barthes

    Use Barthes’s distinction between a literary text and critical language to build a clear interpretation, test its evidence and compare another reading.

  • Matthew Arnold

    Follow how Matthew Arnold turns a sea view into doubt and an appeal in Dover Beach, then compare the answer offered by Self-dependence.

  • John Clare

    Read John Clare’s The Nightingale’s Nest through its precise details, changing instructions and tension between admiration and intrusion.

  • E. E. Cummings

    Use a Cummings poem to explore unusual grammar, ambiguous names and recurring patterns, with a practical method for annotating form.

  • Lord Byron

    Distinguish Byron writing to his publisher, a lyric’s praising speaker and Manfred’s troubled voice before interpreting or sharing a quotation.

  • Beat Writing

    Compare Kerouac’s narrative momentum with Ginsberg’s repetition and direct address, then use a short exercise to explain how literary rhythm works.

  • Albert Camus

    Read the opening of The Myth of Sisyphus beside Camus’s preface, distinguishing a question, a starting assumption and a stated conclusion in Justin O’Brien’s translation.

  • Arthur Symons

    Compare Symons’s account of suggestion with the music-hall “Prologue” to London Nights, tracing sensory detail, self-recognition and repeated form.

  • John Woolman

    Read two linked episodes in Woolman’s Journal, tracing pressure, reflection and refusal while separating his own account from later testimony.

  • Charles Brockden Brown

    Compare the preface to Edgar Huntly with its opening night scene, separating what the narrator sees, suspects and still has to establish.

  • Tzvetan Todorov

    Use an original miniature story and The Lion and the Mouse to compare roles, relationships and changes, beginning with Todorov’s distinction between a work and its structure.

Writers and thinkers

Browse the wider collection of quotations, excerpts and literary notes. Source detail varies by entry; consult the original work when citing a passage.

Forms, movements and traditions