Quotes About Literature

Good books shouldn't be hidden away. They should be read by as many people as many times as possible.

That means letting them read books that are too easy for them, or too hard for them. That means letting them read books that challenge them, or do nothing but entertain them. And yes, it means letting students read books with things in them we might disagree with and letting them make up their own minds about things, which is downright scary sometimes. But that's what good education is all about.

I should have written books instead of reading them.

Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.

Books require titles; reading them doesn't

If you find a good book, read it

The mark of a good book is that you're happy to come home to it. The mark of a great book is that you occasionally schedule your life to stay home with it.

Initially [my favorite books] seem to immerse me in another life, but ultimately they immerse me in me; I am looking through the window into another person's home, but it is my face that I see in the reflection.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

The classics can console. But not enough.

It is impossible for individuals to examine the huge number of new books that are being published every day

When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.

So our student will flit like a busy bee through the entire garden of literature, light on every blossom, collect a little nectar from each, and carry it to his hive...

When I get a little money I buy books and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Good books and good friends were critical in Lewis's conversion.

Quoting her [Jane Austen] is the second-best recipe for happiness I've ever heard of.

it is that a lot of little black marks on paper can bring a person who died nearly two hundred years ago into your room: bring him so close that you know him much better than you would have known him if you met him in the flesh. It is extraordinary and it is enlarging.

When I get a little money I buy books," he confessed to a friend. "If any is left, I buy food and clothes."13

Inklings followed a simple structure, and their opening ritual was always the same. When half a dozen members had arrived, Warren Lewis would produce a pot of very strong tea, the men would light their pipes, and C. S. Lewis would call out, "Well, has nobody got anything to read us?" Then "out would come a manuscript," and they would "settle down to sit in judgement upon it." The

Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.

No Oxford don was forgiven for writing books outside his field of study—except for detective stories which dons, like everyone else, read when they are down with the 'flu. But it was considered unforgivable that Lewis wrote international best-sellers, and worse still that many were of a religious nature." Lewis

10 October 1946 Tollers continued to read his new Hobbit: so sui generis, so alive with the peculiar charm of his "magical" writing, that it is indescribable—and merely worth recording here for an odd proof of how near he is to real magic. 24

As Tolkien got older, he increasingly denied the participation of others in the creation of his work. Tolkien says this is one of the few places where Lewis's detailed criticisms were useful and just. It may be more accurate to say this is one of the few places where Tolkien specifically acknowledges the careful editing of his friend. Changes

Without Christopher Tolkien, not only would The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings look very different, but so would the face of Tolkien scholarship.