Quotes About Literature

Give me a book. There is no present I care about but that.

Oh, my dear, this is worse than I expected! A strange girl is always a bore among good friends, but one can generally manage her. But a girl who writes books - why, it isn't respectable! And you can't snub that sort of people; they're unsnubbable.

Penso che risulterebbe stancante essere legati per l'eternità al culmine dei momenti più ispirati dei massimi scrittori. Altitudini come quelle sarebbero inadatte a insetti come me. Su questi libri elevati me ne starei aggrappata alla bell'e meglio, con la testa e le ali penzolanti. E forse che anche l'anima non ha voglia, di tanto in tanto, di mettersi in vestaglia?

Wissen Sie, was das für ein Segen ist, die Werke eines Dichters zu lesen, seinen Geist zu kennen, das Beste an ihm, und dabei so entfernt von seiner Heimat, seiner Lebensgeschichte oder seinen Briefen zu leben, dass alles Geschwätz über sein Privatleben und Kritik an seiner Moral nicht zu mir gedrungen ist?

All I want is to read quietly the books that I at present prefer.

But the book! The siren song of the book!

Steinbeck wasn't the thirties and Dickens wasn't the eighteen-hundreds. They were of their times but for the ages. Their writings are not products marketed for a brief time until they're out of vogue and discarded on the scrap heap.

This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.

Puns are the highest form of literature.

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book -- it makes a very poor doorstop.

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,And all thy heart lies open unto me.

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

Connectedness is of the essence of all things of all types. It is of the essence of types, that they be connected. Abstraction from connectedness involves the omission of an essential factor in the fact considered. No fact is merely itself. The penetration of literature and art at their height arises from our dumb sense that we have passed beyond mythology; namely, beyond the myth of isolation.

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past. In its day, the literature of the past was an adventure. Aischylus, Sophocles, Euripides were adventurers in the world of thought. To read their plays without any sense of new ways of understanding the world and of savouring its emotions is to miss the vividness which constitutes their whole value. But adventures are to the adventurous. Thus a passive knowledge of the past loses the whole value of its message.

The debates have now become too wide ranging and the literature too voluminous to be considered in any depth here.

Words words words. Words Words words. Words words Words .

Els punts i final ens agraden: les simetries, trobar sentit al que no en té -¿és potser aquesta, la gran tasca de la literatura: explicar-nos el món per fer-nos creure que té sentit?

Books. Knowledge. Years of reading. All of which means? I know stuff.

I hear them. But am I going to let it stop me reading?

It was what we did," Helen [Clyne, Kate Atkinson's daughter] said. "It was a habit, a ritual. You borrowed it, you read it, you brought it back and chose something else, and someone else read whatever you read before and after you. It was communal. That's what public library means: something communal.

What the future held for her she didn't know. Of two things only she was certain. There would be children-her own or other people's-and there would be books.

He doesn't know anything," said Klein. "That's his trouble. He's clever, but he doesn't know much. I guess he only began to read books a couple years ago. They excite him too much. He wouldn't read a fairy story. He'd think he was wasting time.

She read Housekeeping, which Heidi loved because the odd people were the good people; The Handmaid's Tale, which she understood was terrifying even if the details were fuzzy; Giovanni's Room, which made her sigh, because people were so stubborn; The Professor's House, which she loved for the spooky dress form and Tom's trip to the old Southwest; and Anywhere But Here, which was Maud's favorite, because it starred a girl.