Quotes About Literature

Rousseaux was considered the pope of book critics, and reading L'Etranger made him reflect: "It seems that the crisis of the novel gets a little worse every day. Young novelists' debuts do not just mostly reveal mediocre talents.

Les personnages de nos autres vies sont des fantômes que la littérature fait revivre.

La littérature est un théâtre à ciel ouvert qui permet de transformer les êtres les plus simples en héros universels, loin des parterres présomptueux. Conrad, Le Voyageur de l'inquiétude

Un buon libro lascia al lettore l'impressione di leggere qualcosa della propria esperienza personale. Quando la letteratura è al suo apice ci sembra che d'improvviso ricordiamo qualcosa d'importante che sapevamo ma abbiamo scordato.

Likewise in our Zen sect, although we boast of having no words or phrases, we cannot help the profuse amount of literature because it expresses compassion or what we call "grandmotherly concern.

Some people contend that this means the complete integration of subject and object whenever they meet. This interpretation is interesting in content, but it is not necessarily substantiated by anything in the literature of Zen.

Why didn't an epic poet ever write a word about our lives?

Literature can only imagine hell. For us, the rainy season was a living hell. The epic poets of Hindi have not even touched upon the terrible sufferings of the villages. What a monstrous truth that is.

The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is.

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.

Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow.

I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger.

Le opere postume hanno lo squisito vantaggio di risparmiarti le scemenze o le perfidie di coloro che senza saper scrivere e neanche concepire un romanzo pretendono di giudicare anzi bistrattare chi lo concepisce e lo scrive.

There was much that was endearing in this strangely Russian search for absolutes —such as the passion for big ideas that gave the literature of nineteenth-century Russia its unique character and power—and yet the underside of this idealism was a badgering didacticism, a moral dogmatism and intolerance, which in its own way was just as harmful as the censorship it opposed.

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

Shakespeare was a popular artist. Dickens was a popular artist. The artists I personally have always enjoyed the most are popular artists. I wish I were one - but I'm not. I'm more like Celine - writing away at books no one ever reads.

A good book is always good, no matter how many times you've already read it.

Beautiful feelings make bad literature. In which case, this precious state of prose is proof that I'm no devil after all. Ah, blessed be the man who coined this phrase! It is a treasure of the language. An author can get away with using it but once in his career. Sad to say. The first time, it's endearing. If you insist on using it a second or a third time, though, dear reader, hiding behind it like a shield, you can expect nothing but misery.

Crime and Punishment. Dostoievski. These words grazed over a corner of my mind, startling me. Just supposing Dostoievski ranged 'crime' and 'punishment' side by side not as synonyms but as antonyms. Crime and punishment-- absolutely incompatible ideas, irreconcilable as oil and water. I felt I was beginning to understand what lay at the bottom of the scum-covered, turbid pond, that chaos of Dostoievski's mind--no, I still didn't quite see...

The "literary world" was a place I was grateful for, and blessed, I thought, were those who could spend their lives there.

I hated school and never read a textbook. I only read entertaining books.

Eu sou um gato, de Soseki,

Kitap okuma denilen ?ey benden kopar?l?p al?n?rsa, hiçbir hayat deneyimi olmayan ben a?lanacak hâlde olurdum galiba.

I learned to read silently too. That's why I could finish one book after another without getting tired.