Quotes About Literature

All poetry is difficult to read,—The sense of it is, anyhow.

Rafael made a century of sonnets.

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

We can say nothing but what hath been said. Our poets steal from Homer…. Our story-dressers do as much; he that comes last is commonly best.

They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works.

Hence it is clear how much more cruel the pen is than the sword. (Hinc Gham Sit Calmus Saevior Ense Patet)

What a glut of books! Who can read them?

No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one.

all winter, far into the night, we read books and we practised writing. 20.

He angrily rejected a disparaging remark about the literary quality of Chernyshevsky's work, and confessed that it had influenced him profoundly, particularly when he reread it after his brother's execution: "It captivated my brother, and it captivated me. It made me over completely. . . .

Expulsions on political grounds were numerous as early as the eighteen-seventies, when many of the students began applying their knowledge of Russian to the study of the populist literature coming from up north. Secret study and discussion groups flourished from that time on, and rebellious actions flared up on occasion.

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.

Does it make me a better person to read Cicero in the original? Cicero, for god's sake? The Alan Dershowitz of the Roman Republic?

Our truest and best American antiquity, as the Dominion History of the Union insisted, was the nineteenth century, whose household virtues and modest industries we had been forced by circumstance to imperfectly restore, whose skills were unfailingly practical, and whose literature was often useful and improving.

I read a lot of bad books- books so bad that they aren't even published,which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published. - The Ghost, Robert Harris.

So," said Ruth, "how bad is it?" "You haven't read it?" "Not all of it." "Well," I said, politely, "it needs some work." "How much?" The words "Hiroshima" and "nineteen forty-five" floated briefly into my mind. "It's fixable," I said, which I suppose it was: even Hiroshima was fixed eventually.

I have put out my books and now my house has a soul.

si alguien me preguntara: «Tiro, ¿por qué te saltas un período tan largo de la vida de Cicerón?», me vería obligado a contestarle: «Amigo mío, porque esos fueron años de felicidad, y hay pocos asuntos cuya lectura resulte más aburrida que la felicidad»

He sought refuge in his books

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.

Reading is like breathing. If you take it away, first I become antsy, then violent.

You read too much and understand too little.

And what is written well and what is written badly...need we ask Lysias or any other poet or orator who ever wrote or will write either a political or other work, in meter or out of meter, poet or prose writer, to teach us this? What is good, PhÊdrus, and what is not good...need we ask anyone to tell us these things?