Quotes About Literature

Consequently, Sylvia Plath's elevated position among literary figures has extolled her from the depths of depression to the heights of heavenly poetic bliss."

Sylvia Plath's writing, to her, broke open the "vaults of the dead"

I would like to have the superpower of being able to touch a book and then gain all the knowledge out of that book without spending hours and days reading it.

In a talk at a recent Phi Beta Kappa meeting, Duke University professor Katherine Hayles confessed, "I can't get my students to read whole books anymore."10 Hayles teaches English; the students she's talking about are students of literature.

As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style. Writing will become a means for recording chatter.

For the last five centuries, ever since Gutenberg's printing press made book reading a popular pursuit, the linear, literary mind has been at the center of art, science, and society. As supple as it is subtle, it's been the imaginative mind of the Renaissance, the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the inventive mind of the Industrial Revolution, even the subversive mind of Modernism. It may soon be yesterday's mind.

We've reached the point where a Rhodes Scholar like Florida State's Joe O'Shea—a philosophy major, no less—is comfortable admitting not only that he doesn't read books but that he doesn't see any particular need to read them.

reading books chronically understimulates the senses."11

According to one estimate, the number of books produced in the fifty years following Gutenberg's invention equaled the number produced by European scribes during the preceding thousand years.

Translation is a tricky business," Holmes observed, placing the tips of his fingers together in his accustomed fashion. "Cervantes once said that reading something in translation is like looking at a Flemish tapestry wrong side out. The image may be there, but is obscured by a great many dangling threads.

All deeply good characters in imaginative literature, have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they comprehensible by readers and expressible by writers. Aldous Huxley

Books are the province of romantics and humanists, not heartless nerds.

There are always differences, tensions, paradoxes between what a text says (or what an author wants to say, or thinks s/he is saying) and what a text does.

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

Our house was a temple to The Book. We owned thousands, nay millions of books. They lined the walls, filled the cupboards, and turned the floor into a maze far more complex than Hampton Court's. Books ruled out lives. They were our demi-gods.

Our house was a temple to The Book. We owned thousands, nay millions of books. They lined the walls, filled the cupboards, and turned the floor into a maze far more complex than Hampton Court's. Books ruled out lives. They were our demi-gods.

tsundoku – a word that required a sentence in English: buying books and piling them up on a shelf without reading them.

But she would always tell herself, Who needs friends, when you have books.

Seeing her books reassured her, made her feel calm.

Who needs friends, when you have books,

My dad's side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There's an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It's very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It's very warm, it's very up, it's very down. I would celebrate that.

I don't watch a huge amount of telly. I read a lot. I'm reading at the moment 'Freedom ' by Jonathan Franzen, a great big brick of a book, and I'm loving it.

After the Saudi plutocrat Khalid bin Mahfouz used English law to attack books that American houses had not even published in England, President Obama signed a law that stated that the US courts should not enforce the orders of English judges against American authors.

Compared to the millions killed in wars and genocides in the years that followed the fatwa, the pain the enemies of the novel inflicted was small. But it was sufficient. The threats against Rushdie produced a fear that suffused Western culture and paralysed its best instincts.