Quotes About Literature

A man's library opens up his character to the world.

Before long, I had lost my youth and my patience for indulging others. Books were everything in life; books were better than wine.

Strangers talking over piles of books do not remain strangers for long. Had I never learned to like books, I would have become the dullest sort of hermit.

Till America has learned to love literature not as an amusement, not as a mere doggerel to memorize in a college room, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy, my dear reverend president, she will not have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a people. That which raises it from a dead name to a living power.'

The books do pretend, Mr. Branagan. Surely. But that is not all. Novels are filled with lies, but squeezed in between is even more that is true—without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see?

Do not ask what brings Dante to man but what brings man to Dante-to personally enter his sphere, though it is forever severe and unforgiving.'

He rang'd his tropes, and preach'd up patience;Back'd his opinion with quotations.

Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly.

One of the things I have come up against time and again in my career is the notion that because a book is easy to read it was somehow easy to write .

Mercedes Lackey,

You knew—who knew not Astrophil?

Murakami played with the formulas of mass literature—what is elsewhere termed formulaic fiction—but at the last minute subverted the expectations of those formulas and left the reader wondering what had just happened. This to some degree accounted for the peculiar sense of simultaneous thrill and discouragement one often felt at the end of some of these texts.

It should be a pleasure to the appreciative reader, while recognizing their beauty, to cull these flowers of thought for the benefit of those who, less fortunate than himself, have not the time to indulge in literary pleasures.

It's not incidental that Comyns and Rhys were women writers during the interwar period and just after, when a lot was permitted and a lot was denied for women. No way forward? No way back? Levitate.

I was born with a reading list that never ends.

I was born with a reading list, I will never finish.

I was born with a book list i will never finish

Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.

Say, you told me you thought Les Miserables was the greatest novel ever written. I think Vanity Fair is the greatest. Let's fight. - Joe Willard

The mother/daughter relationship and the separation from the mother is so complex that in most women's literature and fairy tales the mother remains absent, dead, or villainous.

The notion of characters, as the traditional form of the novel, is only one of the compromises by which the writer, drawn out of himself by literature in search of its essence, tries to salvage his relations with the world and himself.

Kafka remarks, with surprise, with enchantment, that he has entered into literature as soon as he can substitute "He" for "I." This is true, but the transformation is much more profound. The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing.

Lo que atrae al escritor, lo que hace vibrar al artista, no es directamen­te la obra, sino su búsqueda, el movimiento que conduce a ella, la aproximación de lo que hace posible a la obra: el arte, la literatura y lo que disimulan estas dos palabras. - El libro que vendrá. (p. 223)

Then literature has the glorious solitude of reason, that rarefied life at the heart of the whole which would require resolution and courage if this reason were not in fact the stability of an ordered aristocratic society; that is, the noble satisfaction of a part of society which concentrates the whole within itself by isolating itself well above what sustains it.