Quotes About Literature

Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.

All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books - books so bad they aren't even published, which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published. And what they all have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don't ring true. I'm not saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the time you're reading it.

In certain books—some way in the first few paragraphs you know that you have met a brother.

We read books. They make us think. It matters very little whether we agree with the books or not.

There are treasures in books that all the money in the world cannot buy, but the poorest laborer can have for nothing.

The student of story collections finds himself adrift on an ocean of stories, an ocean which is boundless, deep and ceaselessly in motion.

the fantastical and damned Iram City of the Columns reappeared in some of the stories of the twentieth-century horror writer H. P. Lovecraft

It should go without saying that methodological naturalism does not commit one to metaphysical naturalism and thus atheism. Unfortunately, the conflation of methodological and metaphysical naturalism is frequent within current popular literature, especially among "militant atheists," who claim that science strongly supports atheism, and by some of the leading voices of Intelligent Design.

Surprising what you can dig out of books if you read long enough, isn't it?

Voltaire had exercised the greatest intellectual influence on Catherine, and Diderot was the only one of the major philosophes she actually met, but it was in Friedrich Melchoir Grimm that the empress found a lifelong friend.

In the evening after supper, Nicholas often sat in the family drawing room reading aloud while his wife and daughters sewed or embroidered. His choice, said Anna Vyrubova, who spent many of these cozy evenings with the Imperial family, might be Tolstoy, Turgenev or his own favorite, Gogol. On the other hand, to please the ladies, it might be a fashionable English novel. Nicholas read equally well in Russian, English and French and he could manage in German and Danish.

Books were her refuge. Having set herself to learn the Russian language, she read every Russian book she could find. But French was the language she preferred, and she read French books indiscriminately, picking up whatever her ladies-in-waiting happened to be reading. She always kept a book in her room and carried another in her pocket.

all texts are at least potentially environmental (and therefore susceptible to ecocriticism or ecologically informed reading) in the sense that all text are literally or imaginatively situated in a place, and in the sense that their authors, consciously or not, inscribe within them a certain relation to their place.

The obvious reason for this is that Plato is himself mythopoeic: when he abandons dialectic to "theologize," he does so not by interpreting existing texts or stories but by generating new myths.

I am a bookworm. For play, I bury myself in the corners of libraries and read.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

In it, he pushed the metric of typewriter spaces, and quoted from a poem, "The Catholic Bells," to show us Williams's "mature style at fifty"! This was a memorable phrase, and one that made maturity seem possible, but a long way off. I more or less memorized "The Catholic Bells," and spent months trying to console myself by detecting immaturities in whatever Williams had written before he was fifty.

The great ages of prose are the ages in which men shave. The great ages of poetry are those in which they allow their beards to grow.

A book of quotations . . . can never be complete.

We can put it in its proper perspective by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.

I wonder how appropriate it is to try to 'argue someone into the kingdom.' Many apologists hotly deny any such charge, but I don't believe them. The tenor of almost all apologetics literature makes it plain that this is their intent.