Literature: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 7

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27Drive

183Stillness

52Wonder

Q0625

WonderHistory

The Rosetta Stone matters not because of its age, but because it carries the same decree in three scripts — hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek — letting scholars compare them line by line.

Found in 1799 near Rashid (Rosetta) in Egypt and now in the British Museum, the Rosetta Stone records a priestly decree of 196 BC honouring Ptolemy V. Because the Greek version could be read, it became the key: Jean-François Champollion used it to crack hieroglyphs in 1822, reopening three thousand years of Egyptian writing.

British MuseumRead card

Q0852

WonderLiterature

Shakespeare coined or popularised hundreds of words and phrases we still use today.

Words and phrases first written down by Shakespeare include 'eyeball', 'lonely', 'swagger', 'gloomy' and 'break the ice'. Whether he invented them or simply captured lively street talk, his plays are the earliest record we have of hundreds of everyday English expressions.

Literary historyRead card

Q0853

WonderLiterature

Written in Japan around 1000 CE, Murasaki Shikibu's 'The Tale of Genji' is often described as the world's first novel.

Murasaki Shikibu was a lady of the Heian imperial court, writing centuries before the European novel took shape. 'The Tale of Genji' follows desire, status, memory and court life with an intimacy that still feels modern. Its place in literary history is debated, but its ambition is not: it treats inner life as a world large enough for epic attention.

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Q0854

WonderLiterature

Mary Shelley began 'Frankenstein' at around 18, and it was published when she was 20.

Frankenstein began during the famous 1816 gathering near Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and others, after a challenge to write ghost stories. Mary Shelley turned the spark into a novel about creation, responsibility and loneliness.

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Q0855

WonderLiterature

Agatha Christie is among the best-selling fiction authors of all time, with billions of copies sold.

Christie's detective novels have sold an estimated two billion copies, translated into more than 100 languages — figures usually beaten only by Shakespeare and the Bible. Her 'And Then There Were None' is often cited as the best-selling crime novel of all time.

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Q0856

WonderLiterature

J.R.R. Tolkien invented languages and then built Middle-earth partly as a world where those languages could feel alive.

Tolkien was a philologist, trained to hear how languages grow, break, borrow and remember. Middle-earth gained depth because its names, songs and peoples seemed to have linguistic ancestry. The invented world felt old because its words had roots.

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Q0857

WonderLiterature

George Orwell’s 1984 introduced terms like Big Brother, doublethink and Orwellian, giving later generations a vocabulary for surveillance and control.

The power of 1984 is not only its plot but its vocabulary: words from the novel now help people name propaganda, surveillance and doublethink across very different political settings. A story can outlive itself as a set of tools for noticing danger.

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Q0858

WonderLiterature

Arthur Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes, but public demand and pressure helped bring the detective back to life.

Doyle wanted freedom from Holmes, but the detective had already become a public obsession. Readers mourned, protested and demanded his return. The episode shows how fictional characters can become socially real: once a story enters the public imagination, the author no longer controls all of its afterlife.

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Q0859

WonderLiterature

Jane Austen’s novels first appeared anonymously or credited only to “A Lady,” reflecting the gender limits around authorship in her time.

Austen's first books did not carry her name as modern readers expect; 'By a Lady' signalled both respectability and restriction. The anonymity did not make the work smaller. It reveals the social gate a woman writer had to pass before her intelligence could speak in public.

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Q0860

WonderLiterature

The Brontë sisters first published under the male-sounding names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.

Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë first published as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell — male-sounding names chosen so their work would be judged without the prejudice reserved for women writers. 'Jane Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights' reached the world before anyone knew their authors were sisters.

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Q0861

WonderLiterature

Franz Kafka asked his friend to burn his unpublished manuscripts after his death.

Kafka left instructions that his unpublished work should be destroyed, but Max Brod ignored them and edited the manuscripts for publication. Without that act of betrayal-or-rescue, novels like The Trial and The Castle might not have reached readers.

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Q0862

StillnessLiterature

Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems but published only a handful in her lifetime.

Dickinson’s poems were found after her death in hand-sewn fascicles and loose sheets. Early editors altered punctuation and wording, but later editions restored more of her startling dashes, slant rhymes and compressed force.

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Q0863

DriveLiterature

Hemingway's 'iceberg theory' held that the deepest meaning of a story should lie beneath the surface.

Hemingway argued that a writer should leave most of a story submerged: state only the surface, and let the deeper weight be felt rather than explained. Like an iceberg, seven-eighths stays out of sight — the reader senses what is never spelled out, which is exactly what gives the prose its force.

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Q0864

WonderLiterature

The Epic of Gilgamesh is among the oldest surviving works of literature, carrying friendship, grief and mortality from ancient Mesopotamia.

Written in cuneiform on clay tablets, the Epic of Gilgamesh carries power, friendship, grief and the fear of death across thousands of years. Its distance is part of its force: a voice from ancient Mesopotamia still knows what it means to lose someone and ask what a life is for.

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Q0865

WonderLiterature

Cervantes' 'Don Quixote' (1605) is often called the first modern novel.

Published in two parts (1605 and 1615), Cervantes' tale of a deluded knight and his down-to-earth squire broke from the heroic romances of the day with self-aware, fully human characters. It is often called the first modern novel — and, after the Bible, one of the most translated books ever written.

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Q0866

WonderLiterature

Many of Dickens's novels first appeared as monthly instalments, each ending to keep readers hooked.

Dickens released most of his novels in cheap monthly instalments, building suspense like a modern TV series. When 'The Old Curiosity Shop' neared its climax, American readers reportedly crowded the New York docks shouting to arriving ships, 'Is Little Nell dead?'

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Q0867

DriveLiterature

Dr. Seuss reportedly wrote Green Eggs and Ham using only 50 different words after a challenge to make a tiny vocabulary entertaining.

The book's constraint became its engine: repetition, rhyme and variation made fifty words feel lively rather than thin. Limits can sharpen invention instead of blocking it — creativity often begins when the box gets smaller.

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Q0868

WonderLiterature

Edgar Allan Poe's stories of ratiocination helped create the detective genre before Sherlock Holmes.

Poe called these stories “tales of ratiocination,” meaning reasoning. In C. Auguste Dupin he created many detective-fiction habits before Sherlock Holmes: the brilliant outsider, close observation, and the solution hidden in plain sight.

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Q0869

WonderLiterature

Marcel Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time' is one of the longest novels ever, at well over a million words.

The famous memory trigger is a madeleine dipped in tea, not memory as a simple recording. Proust turns one taste into a doorway: the body remembers before the mind has finished explaining.

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Q0870

StillnessLiterature

A traditional Japanese haiku captures a single passing moment — often one small image from nature — in just three lines of 5, 7 and 5 sounds.

Haiku was perfected by masters like Matsuo Bashō in 17th-century Japan. The strict 5-7-5 form, a season word (kigo) and a deliberate 'cutting' pause force the poet to distil one vivid instant — which is why a good haiku feels like a photograph made of words.

Japanese poetic traditionRead card

Q0871

WonderLiterature

Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick' opens with the famous line 'Call me Ishmael.'

“Call me Ishmael” sounds simple, but it immediately creates distance: the narrator gives a name while hiding a past. Moby-Dick was not a major success in Melville’s lifetime, and its modern reputation rose much later.

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Q0872

WonderLiterature

Shakespeare and Cervantes are both associated with April 1616, but England and Spain used different calendars.

Cervantes died in Gregorian-calendar Spain, while Shakespeare died in Julian-calendar England. Their traditional dates look almost simultaneous, but calendar systems make the neat coincidence less simple than it first appears.

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Q0873

WonderLiterature

Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' is written as a collection of letters, diary entries and news clippings.

Dracula’s epistolary form lets the horror arrive as documents: journals, letters, telegrams, ship logs and newspaper reports. That structure makes the impossible feel bureaucratically real, as if the monster left a paper trail.

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Q0874

DriveLiterature

J.K. Rowling's first Harry Potter book was turned down by numerous publishers before its success.

The first Harry Potter manuscript was rejected repeatedly before Bloomsbury accepted it. The story is often told as pure luck, but it also shows persistence, revision, timing and one publisher willing to listen to a young reader’s delight.

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