Quotes About Literature

She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.

We read poems from the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse. Neil insisted on spilling wine over my carpet.

What's real and what's not? People we meet in books--Holden Caulfield, Captain Ahab, Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter, Bilbo and Gandalf and Frodo-- can become more memorable, and more important to us than people with birth certificates and drivers' licenses. Characters spawned in an author's imagination find a home inside us. They make our lives richer. They become our best friends. They never disappoint. And they never die.

Stories--from the literature of our culture to descriptions of our days to the lunatic's ravings--appear to be hardwired into us. Even in sleep we tell ourselves stories through our dreams, and it's been shown that those who are prevented from doing so cease to function.

The question is not whether he read James, but which James he read.

The public couldn't get enough; writers such as Braddon reaped a new financial harvest with every book. She admitted that she cranked out some volumes as bill-paying hack work. Once she complained to Bulwer Lytton that "the amount of crime, treachery, murder, slow poisoning & general infamy required by the halfpenny reader is something terrible,

You start by reading books, and you end by loving them

Aldous Huxley, Goethe, D.H. Lawrence, August Strindberg ve Jack London gibi ünlüler Beden D??? Deneyim ya?ad?klar?n? bildirmi?lerdir.

Byron clapped Walter on the back. 'Good work,' he said. Walter shook his head. 'You're the one who clocked her with the Stephen King hardcover. That took some of the wind out of her.' 'Thank heavens he's a wordy man,' said Byron.

To be fair he is Lord Byron," Jane said. "I don't know many people who haven't slept with him at one time or another." -- Jane Fairfax

The ultimate luxury is to reread: to revisit a book to see how time has treated it, how memory has distorted it, or how my own passing years have cast a new light on it.

Hindu love? Is it by Rudyard Kipling?

Everyone knows the feeling of excitement on discovering a book that unlocks the imagination; it enables us to inhabit another world - of heightened language, thought and ideas. Great literature holds the seed of a kind of liberation that remains with us throughout life

Tonally, the jagged syntax of 'Inch-thick', the Ovidian lyricism of 'O Proserpina' and Autolycus's bawdy swagger show Shakespeare at his widest-ranging. This is total mastery. Nobody had taken the English language further, and nobody has done so since.

Novel is a particular form of narrative./ And narrative is a phenomenon which extends considerably beyond the scope of literature; it is one of the essential constituents of our understanding of reality. From the time we begin to understand language until our death, we are perpetually surrounded by narratives, first of all in our family, then at school, then through our encounters with people and reading. - The Novel as Research. (1968)

It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other.

We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem that to understand a good one.

Poutine serait-il féru de philosophie ? Allons donc ! L'homme préfère l'histoire, la littérature, et surtout le sport. Il n'est pas un intellectuel. Il adore raconter sa jeunesse de voyou et d'espion plutôt que d'évoquer ses études à la faculté de droit de Saint-Pétersbourg.

Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant.

To love a book is, above all, to love its author: we want to meet him again, we want to spend our days with him.

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know

Tout est kitsch, si l'on veut. La musique dans son ensemble est kitsch; l'art est kitsch; la littérature elle-même est kitsch. Toute émotion est kitsch, pratiquement par définition; mais toute réflexion aussi, et même dans un sens toute action. La seule chose qui ne soit absolument pas kitsch, c'est le néant.

It was amazing, even, to think that the only thing left to people in their despair was reading.

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature—it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 percent of the time.