Quotes About Literature

The last thing you want first-graders thinking is that what they're reading in first grade is as good as books are going to get!

Instead of educating the I.Q., we need to educate the H.Q., the heart quotient, the matters of truth, love, justice, and compassion. There are two ways to do this. One is through the read life experiences and the other is through literature. Literature has the power to take us outside ourselves and returns to ourselves a changed self.

Follow the suggestion of Dr. Caroline Bauer and post a reminder sign by your door: "Don't Forget Your Flood Book." Analogous to emergency rations in case of natural disasters, "flood" books should be taken along in the car or even stored like spares in the trunk. A few chapters from these books can be squeezed into traffic jams on the way to the beach or long waits at the doctor's office.

So how do we educate the heart? There are really only two ways: life experience and stories about life experience, which is called literature. Great preachers and teachers—Aesop, Socrates, Confucius, Moses, and Jesus—have traditionally used stories to get their lesson plans across, educating both the mind and the heart.

Nothing was truly unbearable if you had something to read.

Nada era verdaderamente insoportable si se tenía algo que leer.

When it comes to books, I am a sensuous woman.

This is where the pivotal events of my childhood unfolded, while I ate banana and root beer Popsicles, two by two, tucking the sticks neatly under the skirt of the chair. It's where Sunnybank Lad met Lady, Ken met his friend Flicka, Atlanta burned, Manderley burned, Lassie came home, Jim ran away, Alice got small, Wilbur got big, David Copperfield was born, Beth died, and, on an endless gloomy winter afternoon, Jody shot his yearling.

It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.

If you love books enough, books will love you back.

I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.

And there's no sex, hardly any love stuff at all, in Middle Earth, which always made me think, yes, the world would be better off without it.

I am reading The Lord of the Rings . I suddenly wanted to. I almost know it by heart, but I can still sink right into it. I know no other book that is so much like going on a journey. When I put it down to this, I feel as if I am also waiting with Pippin for the echoes of that stone down the well.

It's lovely when writers I like like each other.

My ideal relationship with a book is that I will read it for the first time entirely unspoiled. I won't know anything whatsoever about it, it will be wonderful, it will be exciting and layered and complex and I will be excited by it, and I will re-read it every year or so for the rest of my life, discovering more about it every time, and every time remembering the circumstances in which I first read it.

There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there are also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn't all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I'd like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin.

I'll take Heinlein over a headmistress any day.

I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.

There's something nice about out-and-out children's books with no sex and a happy ending—Ransome, Streatfeild, that kind of thing.

You know what I'd love to read? A Dialogue between Bron and Shevek and Socrates. Socrates would love it too. I bet he wanted people who argued. You can tell he did, you can tell that's what he loved really, at least in The Symposium.

I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times.

I read in hopes of little sparkling moments that are going to turn my head inside out.

The next day we left for Rome. I had decided to make my books last and read only one book a week, but instead I gorged myself on them.

There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there are also some great books.