Quotes About Literature

reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose -- electronic or printed or audio -- is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation.

I like books. I don't read them. But I like them.

And reading all different kinds of books is not simply reading all different kinds of books; it's a way of becoming more fully human and more humane.

Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio W. H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts," from Collected Poems Jane Austen Russell Banks, Continental Drift Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, translated by Alison Anderson Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader The Holy Bible Elizabeth Bishop Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, translated by Natasha Wimmer

That day at chemo, we talked once more about the ending of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. "I just really want to know which character dies. I've read the ending again and again," I said. "I hate not knowing." "I do too. That's why I always read endings first. But sometimes you just can't know what's going to happen, even when you know everything there is to know. So you prepare for the worst but hope for the best.

You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.

You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them. I don't think I'll ever get over Melanie's death in Gone With the Wind. But I'm still so glad I got to know her.

Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time, one could go to New Zealand.' The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference, there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

We had chosen as our next book club selection Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, as we'd both loved her 2003 novel The Namesake and her first book of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, which had won the Pulitzer in 1999.

The Uncommon Reader, a novella by Alan Bennett

they would soon be old enough to read The Railway Children by Edith Nesbit and Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, and eventually Iris Murdoch and Alan Bennett. They could all be readers, and maybe even uncommon ones.

Reading is the best way I know to learn how to examine your life. By comparing what you've done to what others have done, and your thoughts and theories and feelings to those of others, you learn about yourself and the world around you. Perhaps that is why reading is one of the few things you do alone that can make you feel less alone. It is a solitary activity that connects you to others.

I spend my life collecting books and sentences from them: I've sought alongside ones I've stumbled across, and sentences I've forced into my brain through rote memorization alongside ones that just found their way by themselves. At home, I'm a librarian, forever curating my collection. Outside of my apartment, I'm a bookseller—hand-selling my favorite books to everyone I encounter. There's a name for someone who behaves the way I do: Reader.

Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, which had won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005,

not. Both Mom and I had read it when it came out in 1999 and had recommended it to each other simultaneously. In

We'd both already read several novels by Tóibín: The Master and The Story of Night and The Blackwater Lightship.

Christopher Isherwood's Christopher and His Kind,

There are certain books that I mean to read and keep stacked by my bedside. I even take them on trips. Some of my books should be awarded their own frequent-flier miles, they've traveled so much.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin, had just been published. The other was a Pulitzer Prize–winner, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout,

Almost all the earliest conversations I remember with my parents were about books:

The Uncommon Reader,

Feasting the Heart by Reynolds Price,