Quotes About Literature

Words on a page were seductive, free, inviting everyone, without distinction.

literature enlarges our world of experience to include both more of the physical world and things not yet imagined, giving the "actual world" a "new dimension of depth" (Lewis, Of Other Worlds 29). This makes it possible for literature to strip Christian doctrines of their "stained glass" associations and make them appear in their "real potency" (37), a possibility Lewis himself realized in the Narnia series and the space trilogy.

Western culture generally, as well as the Christian subculture specifically, has had an unwarranted tendency to think that abstract ideas and facts are the only valid type of knowledge that we possess. Literature challenges that bias, and so does the Bible. The Bible is not a theological outline with proof texts attached. It is an anthology of literature.

That is why we not only learn from literature but enjoy it: it delights as it teaches. And it conveys its kind of truth through the creation of concrete images which incarnate or embody ideas which would otherwise remain abstract and nebulous.

The task is rather to assess whether and to what degree works are Christian in their viewpoint. Christian enthusiasts for literature too often seek to baptize every work of literature that they love.

Excerpt from Kenneth Brown testimony] Great comics throughout literature have always disguised by comedy, through laughter, through jokes, an underlying theme which is very serious, and perhaps needs laughter because it is also painful...

If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the mirror of literature?

We're Irish, messed up, superstitious and unorganizable…but, by God, you don't see any poets coming out of Ulster.

To librarians, booksellers, and collectors there is nothing limited in the subject of books about books.

The voters were aware of the Nazi ideology. Nazi literature, including statements of the Nazi plans for the future, papered the country during the last years of the Weimar Republic. Mein Kampf alone sold more than 200,000 copies between 1925 and 1932. The essence of the political system which Hitler intended to establish in Germany was clear.

there are more biographies of Jesus than of any other human—one hundred thousand biographies in English alone.4

They should have a store next to the bookstore called the shit store where you can get shit books to read while on the shitter. No one reads great literature on the shitter.

The books of our childhood offer a vivid door to our own pasts, and not necessarily for the stories we read there, but for the memories of where we were and who we were when we were reading them; to remember a book is to remember the child who read that book.

If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.

It's not as if I don't have anything to read; there's a tower of perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I've been meaning to reread. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the book lust that's afflicted me most of my life.

I am fatally attracted to all bookstores.

Books were in the world; the world was in books.

For those who are afflicted with book lust, those for whom reading is more than information or escape, the road to our passion is quite simple, paved merely by the presence of the printed matter. It's a common story; fill in your own blanks: I was -- years old when I happened on a novel called --, and within six months I had read every other book by the writer known as --.

Watching a scene from a film in slow motion is possible, but there's an unreal air to it; reading a passage from a book slowly does nothing to rob the words of their power. A film presents images; a book creates images inside the reader, with the reader's active participation. Books are good for your brain.

It is with the common book that most readers will spend their head-tilted hours. from The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Americans...publish more books than any other country, but the per capita figure is surprisingly low. Of the English-speaking nations, the United States comes in fifth, behind the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. The United Kingdom publishes 2,336 books per person, the United States 545.

And what is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversation?

what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?

What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations? -Alice in Wonderland