Quotes About Literature

I enjoyed learning the poems, but I didn't understand of what use they might possibly be. 'They'll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,' my teacher said.

The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle, so that, when I finally decide to turn off the library light, I carry into my sleep the voices and the movements of the book I've just closed.

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Imensamente generosos, os meus livros, não me fazem nenhuma exigência, antes me oferecem todo tipo de iluminação.

I could perhaps live without writing. I don't think I could live without reading.

A biologia diz-nos que descendemos de criaturas de carne e osso, mas, no fundo, sabemos bem que somos filhos e filhas de fantasmas de papel e tinta.

My Latin teacher would say, "We must be grateful that we don't know what the great books were that perished in Alexandria, because if we knew what they were, we'd be inconsolable.

Literature is not dogma: it offers questions, not conclusive answers. Libraries are essentially places of intellectual freedom: any constraints imposed upon them are our own. Reading is, or can be, the open-ended means by which we come to know a little more about the world and about ourselves, not through opposition but through recognition of words addressed to us individually, far away, and long ago.

Reading Kafka, I sense that the elicited questions are always just beyond my understanding.... They promise an answer but not now, perhaps next time, next page. Something in his writing... allows me approximations, intuitions, half-dreams, but never total comprehension.... Kafka offers me absolute uncertainties which fit so many of my own.

Every library both embraces and rejects. Every library is by definition the result of choice, and necessarily limited in its scope. And every choice excludes another, the choice not made. The act of reading parallels endlessly the act of censorship.

Aprendí pronto que la lectura es acumulativa y que avanza por progresión geométrica; cada lectura nueva se construye sobre lo que el lector ha leído antes.

Every day, somewhere in the world, someone attempts (sometimes successfully) to stifle a book... And again and again, empires fall and literature continues.

German surgeon Johann Paul Kremer warned in his Auschwitz diary, By comparison, Dante's inferno seems almost a comedy') but as metaphor.

Ésa es la riqueza y la dificultad de la literatura: que no es un dogma.

Kitaplarla ÅŸaÅŸk?na dönmüÅŸ Don Quijote ve hac yolcusu Dante, öÄŸrendikleriyle felce uÄŸrayan Prens Hamlet, okuduklar?yla yaÅŸamak istediÄŸi hayat? birbirine kar??t?ran Emma Bovary..

Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.

It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini.

The creation by word-power of something out of nothing--what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature?

But if you know about God, why don't you tell them?' asked the Savage indignantly. 'Why don't you give them these books about God?' 'For the same reason as we don't give them Othello: they're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now.' 'But God doesn't change.' 'Men do, though.' 'What difference does that make?' All the difference in the world,' said Mustapha Mond.

That was the chief difference between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.

A funny little literary article in the hand is worth at least three Critiques of Pure Reason in the bush.

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

The writer proposes, the readers dispose.