Quotes About Literature

Vocabulary and grammar are your primary tools. They're most effectively used, even most effectively abused, by people who understand them.

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

There can be a "boom" in petroleum or wheat, but there can't be a boom in the novel and less still in poetry.

I don't believe that there are dangerous writers: the danger of certain books is not in the books themselves but in the passions of their readers.

that the Ukrainian choice is a choice between nonexistence and an existence that kills you, and that all of our hapless literature is merely a cry of someone pinned down by a beam in a building after an earthquake—I'm here! I'm still alive!—but, unfortunately, the rescue teams are taking their time and on your own—how the hell are you supposed to get out?

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself." ? Albert Camus

this was why fiction existed, as a way to look at the world without being broken by it.

Literatura to szczególny rodzaj wiedzy, to... (...) ... doskona?o?? form nieprecyzyjnych.

Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves. It is the basic psychological mechanism of the novel. Thanks to this miraculous tool, the most sophisticated means of human communication, our experience can travel through time, reaching those who have not yet been born, but who will one day turn to what we have written, the stories we told about ourselves and our world.

I love the idea of reading books as a brotherly, sisterly moral obligation to one's people.

She squeezes my shoulder and leaves, disappearing between shelves labeled "Drama" and "Action.

There is a certain well-known syndrome named after Stendhal in which one arrives in a place known from literature or art and experiences it so intensely that one grows weak or faints.

Literatura pomaga nam rozpozna? si? w cudzych istnieniach".

That was a new generation of literature—text without spine, fleeting copy, something like the Kleenex that took the helm after the abdication of cloth handkerchiefs.

Kto czyta, ?eby tylko zrozumie?, dopuszcza si? blasfemii. Czyta si?, ?eby prze?ywa? - to g??bszy, bardziej ca?o?ciowy rodzaj rozumienia.

During the first year of their married life, there were surprises for him, gentle shocks almost every day, but nothing shattering. For instance, he was amazed to discover how little education a girl can absorb, and go through a high school and two years of normal school besides. Why, Stella didn't know Thackeray from George Eliot!

One evening, when Stephen started to read out loud to her from one of his favorite authors, in an attempt to lure her inside the books, she told him good-naturedly, for goodness' sake not to spout any more of that dead, old-fashioned, high-brow stuff to her. It gave her the fidgets.

Her heart was bleeding for David Copperfield. Laurel never read David Copperfield when her mother was with her. Today the book, as usual, would be returned to its hiding place behind the cushion in the little parlor when she had finished with it.

Oh, it wasn't work. I love to read." "Do you really?" "I didn't used to so much. It just seemed to come this year—liking it so, I mean." She turned her face toward him. "When you read a book you like a lot," she went on, "do you try to stop between sentences and look around and think it over, like eating a piece of candy just as slowly as you can, so it will last longer?

They liked the book the better the more it made them cry.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

The miscellaneous poetry of this age is nothing like the last; it is very poor.

My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out.

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?