Quotes About Literature

One of the deepest motives (as you are aware) in the human beast (so deep that many have failed to detect it) is Alliteration.

Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature— at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes— is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune.

One novel has been all my reading, Our Mutual Friend, one of the cleverest that Dickens has written.

Thirdly, a collection of passages, both prose and verse, from books other than the Bible. There is not perhaps much, in what is called 'un-inspired' literature (a misnomer, I hold: if Shakespeare was not inspired, one may well doubt if any man ever was), that will bear the process of being pondered over, a hundred times: still there are such passages — enough, I think, to make a goodly store for the memory.

This style of literature was called Nonsense and Carroll was universally acknowledged to be its undisputed master.

Please stop posting movie quotes as if they were from the book. Maybe even read the book for real!

How can one possibly pay attention to a book with no pictures in it?

So it was that she knew she liked him, loved him as they said in the soppy English books, you were shamed and a fool to say that in Scotland.

I know because I read. Might I suggest you try it?

we're in English class, which for most of us is an excruciating exercise in staying awake through the great classics of literature. These works-- groundbreaking, incendiary, timeless-- have been pureed by the curriculum monsters into a digestible pabulum of themes and factoids we can spew back on a test. Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary.

And please, stay away from those books you devour. They are putting the most fantastical tales into your head.

Writers are also sort of like vultures, but with fewer ethics.

Alliteration. It's when you repeat the same consonant in a phrase," Memphis explained. "Huh. I was hoping it was something dirty.

There are no girl books. There are no boy books. There are just books.

I know because I read.

I read a lot.' 'Me, too. One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street Library,' Memphis said, a little cocky. 'Seward Park Library,' Ling answered in kind. 'It's like you're picking baseball teams for books,' Sam said.

Jericho didn't seem to know life beyond the pages of a musty old book, and he didn't seem interested in knowing anything beyond that, either.

There's only one way I can explain it: She had bequeathed me her love of words. She was a librarian.

Then one day he sent her a single long-stemmed rose with the famous Hfez of Shrz poem that you probably know." She recited the lines from the thirteenth-century poem: Give never the wine bowl from thy hand Nor loose thy grasp on the rose's stem 'Tis a mad bad world that the fates have planned. Match wits with their every strategem!

Never before had he met anyone who knew, or cared, that it was Chesterfield who said: Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

It was in that tree that I learned to read, filled with the passions that can only come to the bookish, grasping, very young, bewildered by almost all of what I read, sweating in the attempt to understand a world of adults I fled from in real life but desperately wanted to join in books. (I did not connect the grown men and women in literature with the grown men and women I saw around me. They were, to me, another species.)

Hammett used to be irritated by that and would answer that nobody ever deliberately wrote a potboiler, you just did the best you could and woke up to find it good or no good.

It's like that moment when, often early in the morning, perhaps in a strange house, you pass before a mirror you hadn't known would be there. You see a glimpse of someone reflected in that mirror, and a moment passes before you recognize that that person is yourself. Literature exists in moments like that.

A few pages in Mein Kampf are indeed worth reading, the pages, I mean, that relate to the orator and to the difference between the orator and the writer.