Quotes About Literature

Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.

There's a great quote about Virginia Woolf, she had the same spiritual stake in her diaries as she had in her writing.

I am more than a little jealous that the wonder I am party to has been sprinkled over Salinger's gray head.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

I don't think anybody should read anything except for fun because you won't learn anything unless you enjoy it.

I said Burns was a great Scottish poet who loved before Scott, and Shakespeare and Dickens et cetera were all English, but he could not grasp the difference between Scotland and England.

Higginson served until 1864, and recorded his adventures in a book based on a diary he wrote while campaigning in the South, Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870). The book is a classic of Civil War literature.

Man's real genius and knowledge remains preserved in books

Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.

Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.

One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.

Our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours we will be judged

Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.

Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.

There are those who, while reading a book, recall, compare, conjure up emotions from other, previous readings <...> This is one of the most delicate forms of adultery.

It is likely that libraries will carry on and survive, as long as we persist in lending words to the world that surrounds us, and storing them for future readers.

Only when, years later, I touched for the first time my lover's body did I realize that literature could sometimes fall short of the actual event.

For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end.

Paolo and Francesca were not ideal readers since they confess to Dante that after the first kiss they read no more. Ideal readers would have kissed and then read on.

I have no feeling of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days. They don't require that I pretend to know them all, nor do they urge me to become one of the professional book-handlers ... who greedily collect books but do not read them....

A day or so before his death, Borges called Bioy from Geneva. Bioy said that he sounded infinitely sad. "What are you doing in Geneva? Come home," Bioy said to him. "I can't," Borges answered. "And anyway, any place is good enough to die in." Bioy said that in spite of their friendship, he felt, as a writer, hesitant to touch such a good exit line.

Books are our best possessions in life, they are our immortality.

Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary...

to lend a book is an incitement to theft. A Reader on Reading p. 281