Quotes About Literature

My stories are malevolently anti-narrative, and my essays are maliciously anti-expository, but the ideology of my opposition arrived long after my antagonism had become a trait of character." -- William H. Gass, "Finding a Form

I don't know myself, what to do, where to go... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort... it's what the world offers... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

yes, words were superior; they maintained a superior control; they touched without your touching; they were at once the bait, the hook, the line, the pole, and the water in between.

During this time, Ainsworth met Charles Dickens and introduced the young writer to the publisher Macrone and to George Cruikshank. Ainsworth also introduced Dickens to

Hamlet is a name: his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet.

If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.

We occasionally see something on the stage that reminds us a little of Shakespear. [Oct. 16, 1814, The Champion ]

He who has a contempt for poetry cannot have much respect for himself or for anything else.

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

Luckily, literature—and by "literature" I mean comic books—provides us a way to discuss issues like these without having to experience them. We don't have to trick people into standing in front of a runaway trolley, and we don't have to have a real-life Batman and Joker. That's what thought experiments are for—they let us play through an imaginary scenario and imagine what we should or shouldn't do.

There is, in fact, a rich and informative scientific literature about what works and what doesn't in finance; it is routinely ignored. Instead of depending on the Journal of Finance (the investing equivalent of The New England Journal of Medicine), they get their advice from USA Today or worse, from their stockbroker. Of

HISTORY, IN CORK'S OPINION, was a useless discipline, an assemblage of accounts and memories, often flawed, that in the end did the world no service. Math and science could be applied in concrete ways. Literature, if it didn't enlighten, at least entertained. But history? History was simply a study in futility. Because people never learned.

Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.

The latest edition of a work of science is the most valuable; of literature, the earliest.

But in a private library, you can at any moment converse with Socrates or Shakespeare or Carlyle or Dumas or Dickens or Shaw or Barrie or Galsworthy. And there is no doubt that in these books you see these men at their best. They wrote for you. They "laid themselves out," they did their ultimate best to entertain you, to make a favorable impression. You are necessary to them as an audience is to an actor; only instead of seeing them masked, you look into their innermost heart of heart.

Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.

William Makepeace Thackeray

Goodreads helps quite a few people that love to giveaway their books. I donate some of the books that I get from goodreads.

A man will be known by his books.

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"]

I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language," Hunter wrote. "I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.

It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense.

door. She was not a writer herself, but she was a very good reader, passionate and eclectic in her tastes,