Quotes About Literature

The reading of a fine book is an uninterrupted dialogue in which the book speaks and our soul replies.

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Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your life, too, from bedtime stories you may have heard as a child to news stories you see on TV or read in a newspaper. We might even say that a major goal of living is to created the story of our own lives, a story we hope to take pleasure and pride in telling.

Among history's greatest literary figures, Dickens' name is listed alongside Shakespeare's. He was the most widely read author of his time. Soldiers in the American Civil War carried his books to read aloud around nightly campfires. He was more popular in Russia than many of the great Russian novelists. His twenty novels are all still in print, and he remains popular today.

Our ancestors had fought and murdered one another, married and forged alliances, founded countries. At their best - but only for selfish reasons - they patronized art, literature, and music. But their worlds had to be overthrown by revolutions, because there was room in them only for themselves.

A poem, novel or play that does not in some sense relate to previous texts is, in fact, literally unimaginable.

Literature is, as Salman Rushdie has observed, 'the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way' (Rushdie 1990, 16).

My favorite literature to read is fairly dry history. I like the framework, and my imagination can do the rest.

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed. ~Germaine Greer

William Shakespeare

And it was the same with the Black Cauldron movie—the book was ten times better.

The whole book stays put, right there all the time, always the same, with the words perfectly lined up one after another, waiting.

By being published, any author's words cease to be his own, but rather belong to his reader.

It is the rare young writer who does not fall in love with the idea of becoming famous, and Melville was no exception. When he remarked years later to Hawthorne that no man "who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows," he was reproving his younger self for having craved it.

Between 1820 and 1830, only about a hundred novels by American writers were published in the United States; in the next decade, the number rose above three hundred, and in the 1840s, it leapt toward a thousand.

The young Melville felt constricted by prevailing standards of taste, and knew that in order to make a place for himself in the emerging American literary scene he would have to push his readers to expand their range of curiosity and tolerance.

I was a writer, after all. Shouldn't I have a book?

As Borges himself showed us in so many stories — "The Aleph", "The Garden of Forking Paths", "The Gift", "Blue Tigers", "Shakespeare's Memory" — a blessing is always a mixed blessing. As Borges noted sadly, he inherited a library, and blindness; we who study Borges inherit great sight, yet the rest of the library somehow fades. (pg 303, "What I Lost When I Translated Jorge Luis Borges")

'Anna Karenina.' I read it in college. I was so engrossed that I couldn't stop reading it and neglected all my other studies. I would go to the library even on nice warm weekends and just lock myself up. I think that was the first time that I felt transformed by a book.

I grew up having the library as the best place ever. I spent a lot of weekends there as a kid - my parents would drop me off and leave me there all day. I would just sit in the back and read whatever I could find.

What I find remarkable is that so much of the 18th century literature that I read is more accessible than reading your alternative weekly from ten years ago. People really aspired to write clearly.

The 'Pride and Prejudice' with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle was something I watched on a weekly basis with my mum at home in Oxfordshire.

The 'beach read' has become such a ubiquitous concept in contemporary literature that we assume it has always been around. In fact, the term only emerged in the 1990s, usually in book trade publications such as 'Booklist' and 'Publisher's Weekly.'

Critics who do the weekly recap, I find that kind of absurd. That's like reviewing chapters in a novel.