Quotes About Literature

In fact, when you think about it, if a word from the street occurs in a book it is not the writer who is guilty, but the readers, and primarily those readers belonging to the upper classes: for they are the ones who will never utter a single decent Russian word; their speech is so abundantly stuffed with every manner of French, German, and English words that you want to block your ears...

Ihm gefiel nicht das, was er las, sondern eher das Lesen an sich, oder besser gesagt, der Prozess des Lesens selbst, wo sich da doch immerzu aus den Buchstaben irgendein Wort ergibt, das manchmal weiß der Teufel was bedeutet. Dieses Lesen wurde gemeinhin im Vorraum auf dem Bett im liegenden Zustand vollzogen, auf der Matratze, die infolge dieses Umstands so hart und fest wie ein Fladen geworden war.

You can't imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays. The things these scribblers write!

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

Una volta mostrò a Chodasevic la poesia di un autore della generazione «minore» e gli domandò che metro fosse: un metro, secondo Rudnev, poco serio e addirittura ballabile. Era il trimetro giambico. Chodasevic, arrivato a casa, si sdraiò voltando la faccia verso la parete e disse: «Ecco da che gente dipendiamo».

Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.

Sorel: I wish she hadn't sent me the beastly book, I must say something nice about it. Simon : The binding's very dashing.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology

the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon.

was Balzac, half in jest, who mused, 'What will become of the world when all women are like George Sand?

Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.

So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?

There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book.

the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read; but it doesn't happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I am truly beside myself.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life. — Cited in ALA Bulletin, Oct. 1954, p.475

It was not until 1948 that Cambridge University stopped requiring a knowledge of classical (ancient) Greek as a prerequisite for admission. This requirement was based not only on the intrinsic merits of ancient Greek literature and philosophy. Knowledge of Greek was a screening device to keep out the less affluent, who attended British state schools, where Greek was less likely to be taught than in private schools.

Because the Egyptians had no feeling that events of the moment were transitory, they viewed the present as eternal. The world was static; what seemed like change was only recurrence of the eternal order. Thus, Egyptian literature does not contain careful records of the deeds, or distinctive characteristics of the pharaohs. Rather they are portrayed as the divine ideal, always just, wise, bold, strong, and victorious.

The great impact of Hellenistic culture was, however, no in natural science, but in the more Plato-inspired imaginative literature. The modern novel has its origins in the ultra-heroic and fantastic literature of the Hellenistic world intellectually centered in Alexandria. The life of Alexander the Great was itself one of the prime genres of Hellenistic romanticized literature, and remained so into the sixteenth century.

While my father was out boozing, she'd read to me by the stub of a candle, a thread of soot twisting upwards from its pinched, meager flame. By her voice alone, she could raise up the old stories from the bones of their words and--lilting between shades of comedy and melodrama--turn the dreary space around me into a stage for my wildest imaginings.

Ravished is a nice word found in sentimental novel. Between us, Moran, the word that stuck in my mind like shit to the bottom of a shoe was fucked .

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.