Quotes About Literature

A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

He believed books had an aura that protected him, that without one beside him he would die. He happily slept without women. He never slept without a book.

A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.

work. He has encouraged and backed me up for nearly twenty years now, although we have never met. But it seems to make no difference. I consider Graham Greene not only the finest writer, but the finest and most perfect friend a man can have in this world.'16 For his part, Greene thought Narayan a worthy candidate for the Nobel Prize,17 and in 1974 wrote: 'Since the death of Evelyn Waugh Narayan is the novelist I most admire in the English language.'18

Greene felt that a disaster had set in for the English novel after the death of Henry James; whereas traditional novelists had always conceived of their characters as being somehow under the eye of God, where their actions had an eternal consequence, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster had produced characters who seemed nothing more than the sum of their drifting perceptions. This is a problem philosophers have worried about since the days of John Locke,

The real battle for Christians today is not Armageddon, it is the battle for a sensible approach to that ancient library of books we call the Bible. The Bible was written by human beings, with all the longings, prejudices and illusions that characterise us as a species. It is not an apocalyptic almanac, a mystical code book, an inerrant textbook for living. It is a compendium of a particular people's struggle with meaning; so it should encourage us to do the same in our day.

Their books weren't ink marks on paper but God himself compressed between covers. No wonder they often ended up fighting with each other over who had the best words and the best symbols for God.

In October 1864 the Scottish literary magazine Blackwood's published a satirical article on superfluous Victorian hobbies, especially extreme sports and the fashion for futile risk-taking. It was particularly fierce on the desire to rise above one's station.

Oh there is lovely to feel a book, a good book, firm in the hand, for its fatness holds rich promise, and you are hot inside to think of good hours to come.

So with Dr. Johnson and John Stuart Mill, and Spencer, and William Shakespeare, and Chaucer, and Milton, and John Bunyan, and others of that royal company of bards, thanks to my father and Mr. Gruffydd, I was acquainted, more than plenty of other boys, and thus had a lasting benefit in school.

The silence of the library was complete save for the thudding of his shoes as he walked along the second-floor hallway. Outside, there were birds sometimes and, even lacking that, there seemed to be a sort of sound outside. Inexplicable, perhaps, but it never seemed deathly still in the open as it did inside a building. Especially here in this giant, gray-stoned building that housed the literature of a world's dead.

what felt like skin the texture of cooked mushroom.

And that is to say, of course, that you can read a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the balance with each other.

We write by the light of every book we've read.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

Once you've bought a novel in your pajamas, there's no turning back.

The prose can be brutally beautiful. But the semester starts, you fall in love, get deflowered, watch Kennedy die and the Beatles invade, get high to listen to Coltrane, and discover Heller, Ellison, Ferlighetti, and Bellow -- writing that flows across the page in huge bright swaths that you didn't know English could permit.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

I read then, everything I could lay hands on. Reading was my virgin continent. I read instantly upon awakening, and was still at it well past the hour that consciousness shut down. I read for nothing, for a pleasure difficult to describe and impossible afterward to recover.

Once Ray starts a book, he force-marches through to its conclusion, however hard the slog. Dorothy doesn't mind skipping the author's philosophies to get to those moments when one character, often the most surprising, reaches down inside herself and is better than her nature allows.

People who still love words have to be forgiven everything.

The impersonality of the written word made it the easiest means of exchange...

The spiritual man in mythology, in literature and in the great world religions has an excess of life, he knows he has it, makes no apology for it, and finally recognizes that he does not even need to protect or guard it. It is not for him. It is for others. His life is not his own. His life is not about him. It is about God.

Those who walk the full and entire journey are considered "called" or "chosen" in the Bible, perhaps "fated" or "destined" in world mythology and literature, but always they are the ones who have heard some deep invitation to "something more," and set out to find it by both grace and daring.