Quotes About Literature

Literature allows us to cross the borders -- as imaginary as they are indispensable -- which circumscribe and define our selves. Reading, we allow other people to enter us -- and if we make room for them so willingly, it's because we know them already. The novel celebrates our miraculous capacity to recognize others in ourselves, and ourselves in others. Of all the literary genres, the novel is the genre humain.

Literature allows us to cross the borders -- as imaginary as they are indispensable -- which circumscribe and define our selves. Reading, we allow other people to enter us -- and if we make room for them so willingly, it's because we know them already. The novel celebrates our miraculous capacity to recognize others in ourselves, and ourselves in others.

When I speak to teachers, it's always remarkable to me how unaware they are of the research literature—especially young teachers or student teachers." Yet when it comes to homework, most teachers are true believers.

Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.

All illustrate the "theory of courage," which Tolkien called "the great contribution of early Northern literature," meaning both Icelandic and Old English literature. It is a "creed of unyielding will": The heroes refuse to give up even when they know the monsters—evil—will win. For that is the big difference between Snorri's Ragnarok and the Christian Doomsday. Odin and the human army of Valhalla do not win.

I'm getting tired of Nancy Drew," I told my mother. "The books are all the same." Once I'd become attuned to the pattern of each plot, it became glaringly obvious how alike they were. Mom nodded sagely. "You've discovered the difference between good literature and trash.

My dear Lady Kroesig, I have only read one book in my life, and that is 'White Fang.' It's so frightfully good I've never bothered to read another.

When I read a novel I am not here. I am transported to far-off places, my eyes unseeing of the words on the page, busy with a scene being played out in my mind's eye, with my ears engaged, hearing the voices carry from the pen to the present. What a lovely place to be-not here - Just Jane (Chapter Four Page 35)

A. B. Guthrie's 1947 novel The Big Sky (even better than its sequel, The Way West, which won the Pulitzer Prize), The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1940), and Jack Schaefer's Shane (1949) were all made into well-regarded movies, but these three classics of Western fiction continue to make for wonderful reading.

There are also some moving sections about World War II in Anthony Burgess's Any Old Iron, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, Kit Reed's At War As Children, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard, and Nancy Willard's Things Invisible to See.

Whenever Mr. Peanuts is feeling especially lonely, he goes to the bookstore. That always cheers him up.

Penwoman to Posterity.

Real life was like a plot by Dickens . . .

The more you read, the more you will find your thoughts and conversation reflecting your reading, and the more you will want to read.

Books were like old friends, with their worn covers and well-thumbed pages..

I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.

Only give them history books. Men should read nothing else.

I)n reading . . . stories, you can be many different people in many different places, doing things you would never have a chance to do in ordinary life. It's amazing that those twenty-six little marks of the alphabet can arrange themselves on the pages of a book and accomplish all that. Readers are lucky - they will never be bored or lonely.

To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.

In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.

This is why it is good to remember: if you want to get high, don't drink whiskey; read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Neruda, Hopkins, Millay, Whitman, aloud and let your body sing.

The responsibility of literatuure is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

It's a lot better to sound like Ernest Hemingway than like Aunt Bethune, who thinks Hallmark greeting cards contain the best poetry in America.

it is Simone I want to visit in her cramped grave. To thank her for a single line in The Second Sex that I read in my midtwenties. It rang in my head like a bell, tolling the direction to my future. I paraphrase: In order to create, one must be deeply rooted in society. After reading that line I vowed to elbow my way in, to be heard. I knew women had been pushed to the margins.