Quotes About Literature

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.

I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

The material of literary talent is words; the material of story talent is life itself.

Reading is the creative center of a writer's life." -

If there is a perfect book to start the year with it has to be Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.

The facts of life are to the biographer what the text of a novel is to the critic.

I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on in the world between the covers of books, such sandstorms and ice blasts of words, such slashing of humbug, and humbug too, such staggering peace, such enormous laughter, such and so many blinding bright lights breaking across the just-waking wits and splashing all over the pages in a million bits and pieces all of which were words, words, words, and each of which were alive forever in its own delight and glory and oddity and light.

Nobody has the right to say what he really thinks of an author unless they admire his work.

I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.

Collections of gnomes, adages, sayings, and parables have been made from times immemorial in all countries and in all languages possessing some kind of literature.

One day, she ventured to the palace library and was delighted to find what good company books could be.

It is not mysterious to be home on a Saturday night, reading a novel in a pile of smelly golden retrievers.

When blood dripped on my bare feet or poured over the book I was reading, he was kind.

I own a well-used library card and not much else

I own a well-used library card and not much else pg.10

A book is a postponed suicide.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen . My fatuous expression, and airs of personal immunity—how ill they sit on the face, say, of a Stevensonian! But Jane Austen is so different. She is my favourite author! I read and reread, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.

Sometimes I wonder if there's something wrong with me. Perhaps I've spent too long in the company of my literary romantic heroes, and consequently my ideals and expectations are far too high.

How does it happen that in life as in literature, rebellion, however pure, has something false about it, whereas resignation, however tainted with listlessness, always gives the impression of authenticity