Quotes About Literature

I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way.

I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way. They must be written this way. Sometimes we have spent a whole evening reading and talking and discovered we have only covered two or three pages. It's a form of reading done a century ago.. when Chautauquas were popular. In less you've tried it you can't imagine how pleasant it is to do it this way.

L'excitation que lui donnaient les peines d'amour de ses héros accélérait son pouls, faisait rougir ses joues et briller ses yeux.

the primary and only necessary way of experiencing a work of literary art is not by "understanding" it in analytical terms; it is by thrumming to the work of art.

I once assigned a graduate class Annie Dillard's The Writing Life—a book I love—and one of the students said, "It's so effing high-minded it makes me want to go to the Kmart.

Your feature work is as good as anything by Richard Harding Davis.

A man's got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backwood and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books.

A man's got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backwood and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books.

If you enjoy knocking self-publishing writers, write something better first, then, knock on!

They spoke in fragments and ellipses, in paraphrastics and aposiopesis, in a style abundant in chiasmus, metonymy, meiosis, oxymoron, and zeugma; their dazzling rhetorical techniques left him baffled and uncomfortable, which beyond much doubt was their intention.

I feel as if I had opened a book and found roses of yesterday sweet and fragrant, between its leaves.

I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again -- there are too many new ones coming out all the time which I want to read. Yet an old book has something for me which no new book can ever have -- for at every reading the memories and atmosphere of other readings come back and I am reading old years as well as an old book.

Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?

I love a book that makes me cry.

My library isn't very extensive but every book in it is a friend.

I suppose it was a romantic was to perish... for a mouse

What care I if it be wild and improbable and lacking in literary art? I refuse to be any longer hampered by such canons of criticism. The one essential thing I demand of a book is that it should interest me. If it does, I forgive it every other fault.

Our library isn't very extensive, said Anne, but every book in it is a friend. We've picked our books up through the years, here and there, never buying one until we had first read it and knew that it belonged to the race of Joseph.

You can't have many exclamation points left,' thought Anne, 'but no doubt the supply of italics is inexhaustible.

I have been reading three books Dean lent me this week. One was like a rose garden--very pleasant, but just a little too sweet. And one was like a pine wood on a mountain--full of balsam and tang--I loved it, and yet it filled me with a sort of despair. It was written so beautifully--I can never write like that, I feel sure. And one--it was just like a pig-sty. Dean gave me that one by mistake.

Our library isn't very extensive, but every book in it is a friend.

and over the river in purple durance the echoes bided there time.

Many people have told me that they regretted Matthew's death in Green Gables. I regret it myself. If I had the book to write over again I would spare Matthew for several years. But when I wrote it I thought he must die, that there might be a necessity for self-sacrifice on Anne's part, so poor Matthew joined the long procession of ghosts that haunt my literary past.

Nothing good about this but it's title. A priggish little yarn. And Hidden Riches is not a story--it's a machine. It creaks. It never made me forget for one instant that it was a story. Hence it isn't a story.