Literary Trope Quotes

I'm drawn to the figure of the ungrateful subaltern as a trope in literature. In real life, it is often dangerous to demand more.

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.

What women represent to the male is, historically, a big burden. It's a lovely dream, but it's the stuff of literature, art, and everything. Living up to what the male psyche projects onto the female is the stuff of books. You'd need a lot more than an interview to go into it!

I try not to think about the trope or whether or not my books are like 'Fifty' or 'Crossfire' or any other series.

It had come about ex­act­ly in the way things hap­pened in books.

Simply put, if you are a Wayward Victorian Girl, I'll find you.

It is, of course, traditional in children's literature to get rid of the parents.

At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.

It was an old fashioned house --the sort of house in fact, as Strange expressed it, which a lady in a novel might like to be persecuted in.

I suppose as long as novels last, and authors aim at interesting their public, there must always be in the story a virtuous and gallant hero; a wicked monster, his opposite; and a pretty girl, who finds a champion. Bravery and virtue conquer beauty; and vice, after seeming to triumph through a certain number of pages, is sure to be discomfited in the last volume, when justice overtakes him, and honest folks come by their own.

I just totally do not believe in this sort of Bart Simpson character who infects so much of our literature and film and TV stuff nowadays, these know-it-all kids who seem to understand the hypocrisy of the adult world so thoroughly and can talk about it with such articulateness. That's bunk.

Ever since 'Single White Female,' the 1990 novel which was turned into a supremely scary film, the idea of a seemingly normal woman who will stop at nothing to get what she wants has become an abiding literary trope.