Quotes About Literature

Jincy Willett, Sam Lipsyte, Flannery O'Connor, and George Saunders. Oh, and I love Paul Rudnick in The New Yorker.

James Joyce's Ulysses

At the dinner table, make "what you're reading" as regular a part of conversation

We all love remembering the satisfaction, the joy, the almost giddy exhilaration of seeing the world of letters, and as a consequence the entire world, open up to us.

Le livre est un morceau de silence dans les mains du lecteur. Celui qui écrit se tait. Celui qui lit ne rompt pas le silence.

Un livre est un peu de silence entre les mains du lecteur. Celui qui écrit calme. Celui qui le lit ne rompt pas le silence.

Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.

I read books when I was a kid, lots of books. Books always seemed like magic to me. They took you to the most amazing places. When I got older, I realized I couldn't find books that took me to all the places I wanted to go. To go to those places, I had to write some books myself.

Don't let reading make you arrogant. It can happen-believe me. Maybe you've even met a person or two like this, someone who thinks that being an English literature major or particularly well read puts them above the crowd. Take my advice:even if it's true, don't go there. ... I urge you to read, knowing the words you absorb will come out in your life in ways that inspire, uplift and encourage someone else. Life is meant to be passed on. Read with a servant's heart.

Jane austen says: a heroine has pride despite her imperfections.

Kriemhild," she said. "One of the names given to Siegfried's wife in the Norse sagas. I always liked it better than Gutrune, which was the one Wagner used.

some of the original authors like Hartman von Aue or Wolfram von Eschenbach.

Actually, I've never read de Troyes." Probably the most famous of the medieval authors of Arthurian tales. "I took a class in German medieval lit and de Troyes was French." He shrugged…

What's next on your reading list?

Rennie didn't quite dare to answer back, but she looked a whole book and a couple of extra chapters.

I do think it is unfair. People in novels are fainting all the time, and I never can, no matter how badly I need to.

You're always in the kitchen," Alianora said when she poked her head through the door a moment later. "Or the library. Don't you ever do anything but cook and read?

If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport.

We must set out, often without a destination, with only the instinct to search as a direction. Literature and religion are predicated on the notion of journey, movement—pilgrimage it's called in religion, plot in literature.

My greatest fear is being somewhere without a book.

You were given the amazing ability to create universes out of twenty six letters and you're going to the mall? Are you nuts?

My chin is weak. I find it hard to make decisions. For years I had been caught between the two stools of security on the land and rich-scented life on the exotic islands of literature. I wasn't really a writer. I had seen a strange beautiful light on the hills and that was all.

At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.

Yes, this man had the persistence of an insect.