Questions tagged [literature]
written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit.
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Is this the Oath to become a Master Mason?
In Freemasonry, the third degree that one may obtain is called Master Mason. I found a book claiming to contain the rituals and oath that the Mason has to perform. The book is called "Duncan's ...
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Did John Steinbeck say "It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving"?
I often see the quote attributed to John Steinbeck, "It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving ...", when explaining the difference between sympathy and empathy, e.g. ...
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Did Percy Bysshe Shelley take credit for work done by Mary Shelley?
This is going to be a rather unorthodox question by me, as I can't fully legitimize the claim about to be questioned, but today, in conversing with a colleague of mine, the Shelleys popped up in ...
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Are the ingredients listed in "Macbeth" common plants?
It is easy to find dozens of sites claiming, generally without attribution, that the ingredients in the famously gruesome witches' brew from Shakespeare's play Macbeth are herbalist jargon for common ...
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Do the post offices worldwide offer the service of pursuing the addressee over the world? Did they in the past?
There is a poem named "Post" by Samuil Marshak, written in 1927. The poem tells a story of a letter being sent from Rostov to Leningrad. The addressee, Boris Zhitkov (another writer) was not ...
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Does "the captain's daughter" refer to a whip/cat o' nine tails?
Many versions of the popular sea shanty "Drunken Sailor" includes the following verse:
What shall we do with a drunken sailor,
Put him in bed with the captain's daughter.
Sources including ...
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Did Alexander Solzhenitsyn say “they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them”?
A friend of mine just shared a quote
They lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.
And attributed it to ...
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Did the cat-o'-nine-tails' bag ever exist?
There are numerous instances on the Internet and in Google books, which claim the cat-o'-nine-tails, a late 17th century instrument of punishment used by the Royal Navy, was kept in a bag. It is said ...
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Did Lincoln tell Stowe "So you're the little woman that started this great war!"?
I have decided to give Uncle Tom's Cabin another read. A famous quote that surrounds this book, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, in general, is that when she met Abraham Lincoln, he told her
So you're ...
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Does the asteroid 16 Psyche contain this much gold?
Some days ago, I read in several news sources [1][2][3] about an asteroid called 16 Psyche that is made up of precious metals such as gold and platinum. It's estimated worth is about $700 quintillion -...
user36020
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Who wrote “A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.”?
Literature.SE is one of many (query credit to @Glorfindel) SE sites that run community promotion ads. One such ad (below) includes a quote by Samuel Johnson.
Ad credit to @Rand al'Thor (font choice) ...
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Did Stevenson assert his moral right?
I have here a copy of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, republished in 2010 by Harper Press, an imprint of HarperCollins's. On the copyright page is this text, with ...
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Was there a person made the quote about poetry that Poincaré responded to?
It is claimed that Henri Poincaré, a well-known mathematician, said this:
Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.
It is also claimed that that quote was in response to ...
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Did Native Americans call European people "pale-face"?
In lots of American Indian novels you can read that the native peoples of North America called European people "pale-face" or "pale-faced":
“Young Randolph! war-chief among the ...
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Did the first Mughal emperor of India, Babur, write love poems for men?
Sites such as The Tiny Man: Was Islamic Emperor Babur Gay? Or was Babur impotent?, Collecting Indian ness and Rainbow Rays: Was Babur Gay? claim that Babur the founder of the Mughal dynasty and the ...
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Is the Greek/French macaronic phrase written by an ancient author?
From Wikipedia article:
Occasionally language is unintentionally macaronic. One particularly famed piece of schoolyard Greek in France is Xenophon's line "they did not take the city; but in fact ...
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Is the name "Ahmad" mentioned in the dead sea scrolls?
This video claims that the following excerpt is a verse of the Isiah scroll of the dead sea scrolls.
The claim also appears in here.
Is it true?
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Does Lebanon ban the diary of Anne Frank?
According to factslides, a reddit post, Wikipedia, and the Wall Street Journal, the Diary of Anne Frank is banned in Lebanon.
According to a reddit comment this is "rubbish". Other news reports a ...
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Was Licio Gelli nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature?
In Wikipedia it's stated that Licio Gelli
In 1996, Gelli was nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in
Literature, supported by Mother Teresa and Naguib Mahfouz.
The references give some (...
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Did Niccoló Machiavelli advocate to fake one's own death?
September 13, 2014 will mark the 18th anniversary of when 2Pac (born Tupac Amaru Shakur), famous American gangster rapper, was murdered in Las Vegas. There are many conspiracy theories behind his ...
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Is the novel "Sleepers" a true account?
Note: this question contains spoilers about the novel and movie.
Sleepers is a novel about four boys who are sexually abused at a school for boys, and later exact revenge on their tormentors. It was ...
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Was the Education of Little Tree written by an ex-Klansman?
One of my favorite children's books growing up was the Education of Little Tree. This is a popular children's book in the US about a child who goes to live with his Cherokee grandparents in Appalachia ...
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Were deserts once oceans/seas?
I was reading The Alchemist and stumbled upon something that says,
Here and there, he found a shell, and realized that the desert, in remote times, had been a sea.
Were the deserts once oceans/...
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Does the extent of illiteracy in children correlate with future criminality?
Neil Gaiman recently made what has been hailed as one of the best commencement speeches ever at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts (reported here, available as a book here).
In it he talks about ...
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Did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle call J.B. Rhine a "monumental ass" in print?
I need help confirming or debunking what may be an urban legend in the paranormal literature regarding the rocky public relationship between spiritualism believer (and famous author) Arthur Conan ...
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Did Victor Hugo work naked to prevent himself from leaving his desk?
I heard this story numerous times. Allegedly, Victor Hugo would ask every day to a servant to take his clothes so that he would be forced to stay, naked, in his room and work instead of going out and ...
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Did Americans coin the phrase "to make money"?
This claim comes from a work of fiction but it is often repeated as true by fiscally conservative individuals who respect the author. In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, a character named Francisco gives a ...
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Does the new Testament claim that Mary, mother of Jesus, was a virgin?
I have read from quite a few sources stating that there was a mistranslation in the Bible, calling Mary a "virgin" instead of a "young, marry-able woman". It would be interesting to know about such a ...
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Are rape victims forced to marry their rapist, according to the Old Testament?
(Copied from http://www.theliberaloc.com/2012/05/14/traditional-marriage-according-to-the-bible/)
Relevant portion of the text:
Marriage = Rapist and His Victim (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)
Virgin ...
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How much does wet sponge matter in electrocution process?
In Stephen King's novel The Green Mile and its film adaptation one of the characters (Eduard Delacroix) is getting electrocuted. Before the execution one of the correction officers instead of wetting ...
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Was Shakespeare Marlowe? What does stylometry say? [duplicate]
I am not sure why this isn't asked here already, but Peter Farey and Ros Barber convinced me that Christopher Marlowe wrote the works of Shakespeare.
This resolved my own cognitive dissonance from ...
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Did William Shakespeare say "I always feel happy..."?
Is the attribution of this quote to William Shakespeare correct?
I always feel happy. You know why? Because I don’t expect anything from anyone. Expectations always hurt… Life is short… So love ...
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Did William Shakespeare help make the KJV bible?
Many believe because of the placement of specific words in Psalm 46 that William Shakespeare helped in the translation of the King James bible to English.
In 1610, the year of the final editing ...
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Did Conan Doyle write Sherlock Holmes?
I came across the claim that sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn't write the Sherlock Holmes stories and probably just, at most, edited them.
Normally such a claim would not be taken seriously. But the ...
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Who wrote Shakespeare's plays?
One of the premises of a new film, "Anonymous", due to come out in a couple of weeks, is that Shakespeare's plays were authored by Edward de Vere, instead of by Shakespeare. The producers have also ...
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Are the books from Carlos Castaneda real or fiction?
I have read all the Carlos Castaneda's books, I practiced some of their exercises, some have been helpful but I've always been in doubt about whether Don Juan ever existed, or if the events in the ...
user4983
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Was Nabokov's Lolita named after a horse?
I've gotten a pretty popular (based on levels of forwarding) chain email in Russian recently discussing funny "facts" about literature. Most were either mildly amusing or obvious BS, but one claim ...
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Is Robinson Crusoe the first English novel?
This is not the first time I've heard of this, and I'm not really sure this is true. Then I came across this book review:
Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1719 and ...
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Is Macbeth cursed?
I recently read Macbeth and I looked up its history, and apparently there is such a thing as "The Curse of Macbeth". The story is as follows:
Shakespeare, in writing the play, included a lot of ...
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Was the name "Wendy" created for Peter Pan?
I ran across something odd today...
I have an iPhone app that lists facts, trivia, and other useless information (it's called Cool Facts, downloaded from iTunes). So far, nothing I've found on it ...
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Did Shakespeare introduce over 1700 new words to the English language?
I was cruising the JREF forums, and while I am very familiar with many of the phrases he coined and popularized in the English language, a post makes the claim.
Shakespeare coined about two thousand ...
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