Quotes About Literature

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.

They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.

But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.

The feeling for words comes at an early age--or rather it is lost in most cases at any early age, leaving the rest poets" (170).

Is not literature meant to speak of our being a thousand different kinds of things, at times creating even this diversity? If literature gives up this purpose, this duty, it renounces all claim to legitimacy. I am Hungarian. I am Slovene. I am Serbian. You do not need literature for sentences like that. A bureaucrat will do, and a rubber stamp. A border guard. An Army.

It does seem somewhat classical. One can hardly credit that Dante did actually get shown around Hell.

When we are reading we become immersed in stories both on an intellectual and emotional level and when we come back to our own skins, we feel a little changed'.

read, and his last book was Balzac's mysterious tale of the magical shrinking skin, La Peau de chagrin.

I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable, the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature.

He's a cocky SOB. He knew the Nick Adams Stories. Probably a frustrated English major who graduated from college qualified to drive a cab.

Now in her mid-sixties, she had "common-lawed"—her words—old Ansel, who used to manage ranches in California and now spent most of his days rereading the Russians. Chekhov, Turgenev, Pushkin. Ren had once asked him why he loved them, as he himself found the going mostly too dour. "I don't love them," Ansel had said. "You don't?" "Nothing worth serious study is lovable.

I flipped through the Duino Elegies

Back then I could not understand one word of what I read. Reading did, however, give me heart. Even if you cannot understand what you are reading you can get something from books.

This relationship among author, text, and reader is known in the literary trade as

Solomon composed three thousand proverbs, and his songs numbered a thousand and five.

To these four young men God gave knowledge and understanding in every kind of literature and wisdom. And Daniel had insight into all kinds of visions and dreams.