Quotes About Literature

The fantastic in literature doesn't exist as a challenge to what is probable, but only there where it can be increased to a challenge of reason itself: the fantastic in literature consists, when all has been said, essentially in showing the world as opaque, as inaccessible to reason on principle. This happens when Piranesi in his imagined prisons depicts a world peopled by other beings than those for which it was created. (On the Fantastic in Literature)

Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.

There's always time to read. Don't trust a writer who doesn't read. It's like eating food prepared by a cook who doesn't eat.

You're a big help, Mr. I Read So Many Books.

I have always said that a picture book is a palace for a poem. I still believe that.

A sea of dreams trapped in a span of pressed pages

Colin mustered a perfunctory leer, but his mind was obviously elsewhere. 'Do you know...' he began. I knew many things, but I didn't think he needed to hear the entirety of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales right at just this moment.

Amy read Ovid and Virgil and Aristophanes and Homer. She read dry histories and scandalous love poetry (her governesses, who had little Latin and less Greek, naïvely assumed that anything in a classical tongue must be respectable), but mostly she returned again and again to The Odyssey. Odysseus had fought to go home, and so would Amy.

This was Hist and Lit, after all. If you couldn't work the term liminal into your tutorial, you were doing it wrong.

And what of this new book the whole world makes such a rout about?--Oh ! 'tis out of all plumb, my lord,--quite an irregular thing!

I like subordination, quoth my uncle Toby...

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! - take them out of this book, for instance, - you might as well take the book along with them

Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.

Who cares what the color means? How do you know what he meant to say? I mean, did he leave another book called Symbolism in My Books? If he didn't, then you could just be making all of this up. Does anyone really think this guy sat down and stuck all kinds of hidden meanings into his story? It's just a story.... But I think you are making all of this symbolism stuff up. I don't believe any of it.

None of [the books are] worth reading. There are no fairy tales, no faerie tails, no sword-swinging princesses or lightning-throwing gods.

I wanted to pull down a book, open it proper, and gobble up page after page

The school board banned one of Maya Angelou's books, so the librarian had to take down her poster. I fished it out of the trash. She must be a great writer if the school board is scared of her.

the only thing that helped me breathe was opening a book

It's all about SYMBOLISM, says Hairwoman. Every word chosen by Nathaniel, every comma, every paragraph break - these were all done on purpose. To get a decent grade in her class, we have to figure out what he was really trying to say. Why couldn't he just say what he meant? Would they pin scarlet letters on his chest? B for blunt, S for straightforward?

Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico, 457 US 853, 872 (1982), when the Supremes memorably sang: Supreme Court precedent condemns school officials who remove books "simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to 'prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.

when I wasn't stoned the only thing that helped me breathe was a book

I can't believe she gets paid for dreaming up crap like that.

Are you kidding me? It's Shakespeare'! Look at Romeo And Juliet.; they're what, like fourteen years old, and they meet at a party and bam, jump in bed. They hook up in her bedroom with her parents in the house, and then they get caught and everybody dies... Slutty fourteen year olds and gang violence. I can't believe they make high school kids read it.

Frankly, if I walk into your house and you don't have two hundred books somewhere that you haven't read yet, I don't trust you.