Quotes About Literature

Shakespeare should have prepared her.

She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word "escape" used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.

I don't take up the story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere... I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while. It is more like a house. Alice Munro on reading.

She hated to hear the word "escape" used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.

She hadn't been just a once-through reader either. Brothers Karamazov, Mill on the Floss, Wings of the Dove, Magic Mountain, over and over again. She would pick one up, thinking that she would just read that special bit -and find herself unable to stop until the whole thing was redigested

It is one of the strongest bonds, I think, that can spring up between people: sharing a passion for certain books and their authors.

When Toni Morrison said she writes the kind of books she wants to read, she was acknowledging the fact that in a society in which "accepted literature" is so often sexist and racist and otherwise irrelevant or offensive to so many lives, she must do the work of two. She must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating, learning from, realizing the model, which is to say, herself.

This was my first indication of the quality I feel is most characteristic of Zora's work: racial health; a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.

I recognized myself in Jane Eyre. It amazes me how many white people can't read themselves in black characters. I didn't feel any separation between me and Jane. We were tight.

The reason I absolutely treasure literature is that it has taken me out of myself. Out of the narrow self, in which I could easily be stuck, and it has opened up the world to me. It has opened up the emotions of other people and their own aspirations and cares-Alice Walker

I write all the things I should have been able to read.

I have never read Sylvia Plath. My mother has never read Virginia Woolf. In general, we have stayed out of one another's way like this.

For anyone but the landed gentry to refer to a room in their house as 'the library' might seem affected. But there really was no other word for it.

I put the odds on a psychic deathmatch between Attila the Hun and Virginia Woolf at fifty-fifty.

My transformation, thanks in part to Adrienne Rich, was easier than hers had been.

This obsession with death and suffering revealed itself in literature, poetry, art, and particularly in sculpture, with the appearance of cadaver tombs with an effigy of the deceased in life above, and another depicting his or her rotting corpse below—a grisly reminder of the end of all flesh.

I devour books the way gluttons gobble their food.

The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.

You're a throwback. To what? Jess considered this. Hi-tech at work, Emily was paradoxically old-fashioned in her life. She didn't even own a television. The nineteenth century, Jess concluded. No. Eighteenth. You can be eighteenth. I'll be nineteenth. I never pictured you as a Victorian. No, early nineteenth century, said Jess, who had always been a stickler when it came to imaginary games and books. The Blue Fairy, not Tinker Bell. Lucy, not Susan. Jo, not Amy. Austen, not the Brontes.

Sometimes its like Nathaniel Hawthorne is trying to be deep.

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

the day of the publication of the true literature of the American body will be day of Revolution the revolution of the sexy lamb

A woman who loves books has a dreamer's soul, with each story she has read woven into her own.

You will never be lonely with a book at your side