Quotes About Literature

Une pendule inlocalisable perdue parmi les ténèbres des armoires laissait s'égoutter des heures étouffées dans un quelconque couloir lointain encombré de malles de bois précieux et conduisant à des chambres raides et humides où le cadavre de Proust flottait encore, éparpillant dans l'air raréfié un relent usé d'enfance.

Os romances maus contam histórias, os bons romances mostram-nos a nós mesmos.

You don't want to lose the foreign feel of a book entirely, but for me the prime requisite is to get it sounding good in English. If it sounds clumsy, readers will pounce on it of course.

I refer to the eleventh and twelfth centuries as a uniquely fruitful moment in the production and meaning of desire. These centuries saw the first development of romantic feeling.

Journalism may not dare too much. It can be gently humorous and ironic, very lightly touched by idiosyncrasy, but it must not repel readers by digging too deeply. This is especially true of its approach to language: the conventions are not questioned. The questioning of linguistic conventions is one of the main duties of what we call literature.

It is generally felt that the educated man or woman should be able to read Dante, Goethe, Baudelaire, Lorca in the original - with, anyway, the crutch of a translation.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.

A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.

it is splendid to drowse on the davenport, to be warm and fed, to feel the sentences hoist her up and carry her somewhere else.

Where," he asks, "is that book? The one with the birds? In the gold slipcover?

Anthony Doerr

Gulls pass, braying like donkeys, and in the distance the guns thud again, and the rattling of the truck fades, and Marie-Laure tries to concentrate on rereading a chapter earlier in the novel: make the raised dots form letters, the letters words, the words a world.

raised dots form letters, the letters words, the words a world.

Antiquity was invented to be the bread of librarians and schoolmasters.

It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language.

The lost Greek tale Cloud Cuckoo Land, by the writer Antonius Diogenes, relating a shepherd's journey to a city in the sky, was probably written around the end of the first century C.E.

You needn't have it memorized, dear. That's what the library is for.

to feel the sentences hoist her up and carry her somewhere else.

Sometimes I understood what a word meant from reading but had never met it in life.

For in those days I had no idea that many of the greatest books are like a forest, and that the best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost.

Nearly all the school subjects lay great stress on information. But literature makes its appeal to the heart as well as the intellect. Geography

minister of culture," Maecenas, well understood the power of literature to promote official values.