While I know that the beautiful, the spiritual, and the sublime are today suspect, I have begun to stop resisting the constant urge to deny that beauty has a valid right to exist in contemporary art.
If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it - Warren Ellis
I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life. - Toni Morrison
...Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk. - Henry Jenkins
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real. - George Bernard Shaw
Leo Strauss's discoveries in the history of political philosophy had the effect of liberating his students from the yoke of contemporary thought. - William Kristol
Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it."[Q&A with Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2] - David Foster Wallace
As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, "the 'weightlessness' of contemporary belief in God is a reality...for religious liberals and many evangelicals. - Mark Galli
Happiness & Sadness are two contemporary stages in life. A wise man overcomes sadness with his wisdom, and a foolish man faces it with tears. - Deepak Chandra
Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist. - Adam Gopnik
Contemporary Christian church would normally think that things are impossible - Sunday Adelaja
Contemporary poets got so obscure that poetry kind of fell out of favor, - Paul Ruffin
Contemporary American children, if they are old enough to grasp the concept of Santa Claus by Thanksgiving, are able to see through it by December 15th. - Roy Blount Jr.
Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots. - I. M. Pei
Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. - Albert Einstein