Quotes About Literature

I doubt if, after all, I'll ever write anything again worth putting in print.

The clean book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap.

ToScottie March 11, 1939 p. 387- 388 And please do not leave good books half- finished, you spoil them for yourself...Don't be so lavish as to ruin masterpieces for yourself. There are not enough of them!

And his mind strong and subtle like the mind of Cuchulin

I've just finished a book of his, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray,' and I certainly wish you'd read it. You'd like it.

A good style simply doesn't form unless you absorb half a dozen top flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but, instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journaleese.

I wish I was in print. It will be odd a year or so from now when Scottie assures her friends I was an author and finds that no book is procurable.

He was not even a Catholic, yet that was the only ghost of a code that he had, the gaudy, ritualistic, paradoxical Catholicism whose prophet was Chesterton, whose claqueurs were such reformed rakes of literature as Huysmans and Bourget, whose American sponsor was Ralph Adams Cram, with his adulation of thirteenth-century cathedrals--a Catholicism which Amory found convenient and ready-made, without priest or sacraments or sacrifice.

Harold Henderson (1889–1974), who made haiku a part of our own literature, dubbed them "meditations . . . starting points for trains of thought." R. H. Blyth (1898–1964), who published six volumes of haiku translations, made the extravagant claim that "Japanese literature stands or falls by haiku.

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Tú lee todo lo que puedas. Reúne cultura. Cuanta más, mejor. Para que no caigas al agujero en el que están cayendo muchos en este país.

Deshacerme de libros que he amado (la Biblia principalmente por razones literarias) habría supuesto no hace mucho un sufrimiento insoportable para mí, como si me arrancaran las costillas de una en una sin anestesia.

My hapless peers with their lofty dreams--how I envy and despise them! I'm with the others, the even more hapless, who have no-one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I'm with those poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature beside their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact that they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live.

To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.

Escrever é esquecer. A literatura é a maneira mais agradável de ignorar a vida

Perhaps it's my destiny to remain a book-keeper for ever and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and merely underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty.

12. Se escrevo o que sinto é porque assim diminuo a febre de sentir. O que confesso não tem importância, pois nada tem importância Por: Bernado Soares In: Livro do Desassossego

Perhaps it's my destiny to remain a bookkeeper forever, and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty. In the future I'll be living quietly in a little house somewhere, enjoying a peaceful existence not writing the book I'm not writing now and, so as to continue not doing so, I will use different excuses to the ones I use now to avoid actually confronting myself.

That's why I read, as a stranger, My being as if it were pages. Not knowing what will come And forgetting what has passed, I note in the margin of my reading What I thought I felt. Rereading, I wonder: "Was that me?" God knows, because he wrote it.

The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men

La literatura, como cualquier forma de arte, es la confesión de que la vida no basta.

To read is to dream, guided by someone else's hand.

To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarate, and the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning it into a slumber. The other arts make no such retreat – some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.

Literature simulates life. A novel is a history of what never was and a play is a novel without narrative. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings in a language no one uses, since no one speaks in verse.