Quotes About Literature

Das Problem war nur, dass Karin zu wenig über die Leute wusste, die sie in ihren Büchern verurteilen wollte.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.—George Bernard Shaw

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.

No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We've got too many dexterous drudges as it is.

I know that no reader ever asks a question. A writer must force his favors upon his readers.

Wenn eine Gesellschaft vor ihrer literarischen Kultur keine Achtung mehr hat, wenn die Achtung nicht so beschaffen ist, daß sie es als achtenswert empfindet, über diese Kultur einigermaßen Bescheid zu wissen, wenn sie also das unaufhebbare Nichtbescheidwissen der Mehrheit - ihre Unbildung - nicht mehr als bedauerlichen Mangel empfindet, der nur durch die Bildung einer kulturellen Elite kompensiert werden kann, dann ist nichts mehr zu machen.

Voordat ze in mijn boekenkasten verdwijnen leef ik tussen stapels boeken als tussen bloeiende struiken.

All those hints and glimpses of a larger and more satisfying democracy, which literature and our own hopes supply, have a tendency to slip away from us and to leave us sadly unguided and perplexed when we attempt to act upon them.

Of all writers, [Jane Austen] is the most adept at creating both characters who seem to possess an independent existence and a narrator to whom readers feel able to turn, as if to an intimate friend.

Everything Jane Austen read came alive, but, at the same time, her natural empathy with those she encountered through her reading was kept in check by a keen sense of the ridiculous and of the potential absurdity of emotional display.

I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.

Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.

Mrs. Bennet was restored to her usual querulous serenity.

"Only a novel"… in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.

Real luxury is time and opportunity to read books for pleasure.

And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it's just been so worth the effort. It's like I'm planting a garden in my head.

M. Jacques Rivière appears to know no Russian and says no words of 'aspects', but what he explains as his meaning is simply this, that the Russian novel is written in the imperfective, written from within not without, lived not thought about. This modern Russian method is to M. Rivière the exact opposite of symbolist work, where everything is known beforehand, everything achieved then thought or felt about from outside and above.

Language is the un conscious or at least subconscious product of the group, the herd, the race, the nation. Literature is the product more or less conscious of the individual genius, using of course the tools made by the blind herd, but, after the manner of living organisms, shaping these tools even as he uses them.

To take a single and salient instance, to study the folk-epos of Russia, alive in the mouths of the people up to and beyond the time of Peter the Great, is to look at Homer with new and wider opened eyes.

If I could have my life over again, I would devote it not to art or literature, but to language. Life itself may hit one hard, but always, always one can take sanctuary in language. Language is as much an art and as sure a refuge as paint¬ ing or music or literature. It reflects and interprets and makes bearable life; only it is a wider, because more subconscious, life.

I've been a teacher at the college level, in composition mostly, and I've been an editor on magazines.