Quotes About Literature

Edith Wharton did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn't pretty.

You know you'd rather read about me than experience me in person. Why pretend?

There's never been much love lost between literature and the marketplace. The consumer economy loves a product that sells at a premium, wears out quickly or is susceptible to regular improvement, and offers with each improvement some marginal gain in usefulness. To an economy like this, news that stays news is not merely an inferior product; it's an antithetical product. A classic work of literature is inexpensive, infinitely reusable, and, worst of all, unimprovable.

Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write 'The Sound and the Fury' or 'The Sun Also Rises.' But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length.

I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure, and even if I did, what business would I, who feel like the sick one, have in offering it? It's hard to consider literature a medicine; sooner or later the therapeutically minded reader will end up fingering reading itself as the sickness.

So many Jonathans . A plague of literary Jonathans .

He ate arugula ("rocket," the old farmers called it) so strong it made his eyes water, like a paragraph of Thoreau.

His ironies were ghoulish now.

We admit the presence of no author, no oeuvre, and no genre. The text stands bare. . . . We admit nothing outside of the text.

Madness calls literature's bluff by going beyond it and falling short of it at the same time.

Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.

You used to write such honest books. Honest and emotionally ambitious. Maybe they weren't finding millions of readers. Maybe they weren't making you rich. But they were making the world rich

I invented a book that listed every word in every language. It wouldn't be a very useful book, but you could hold it and know that everything you could possibly say was in your hands.

Wings of a half finished book across his chest.

Ai carti publicate? - Nu, dar sunt inca foarte tanar. - Ai povestiri publicate? - Nu. Ma rog, una sau doua. - Cum sunt intitulate? - Las-o balta. - Asta-i un titlu clasa-ntaia.

Rage is properly the title of Homer's poem, and his audience may have known it by that name, not Iliad .

As learnèd commentators view In Homer more than Homer knew.

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.

a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout. I

My hours of leisure I spent in reading the best authors, ancient and modern

Knjiga je nekaj ve? kot besedna struktura. Je dialog, ki ga za?ne s svojim bralcem. Ta dialog je neskon?en, književnost je neiz?rpna, in to zaradi zelo preprostega razloga - ker je vsaka knjiga taka. Knjiga ni stvar brez komunikacije: je razmerje, je opora neštetih razmerij.

Yo siempre me habia imaginado el paraiso bajo la especie de una biblioteca.

Como instrumento de investigación filosófica, la máquina de pensar es absurda. No lo sería, en cambio, como instrumento literario y poético.

Que otros se jacten de las páginas que han escrito; a mí me enorgullecen las que he leído.