Quotes About Literature

Writing one's story narcotizes it. Literature today is an opiate.

We invade your countries, destroy your economies, demolish your infrastructures, murder hundreds of thousands of your citizens, and a decade or so later, we write beautifully restrained novels about how killing you made us cry.

Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass—an hourglass that drains grain by grain. Literature gives me life, and life kills me. Well, life kills everyone.

I am Raskolnikov. I am K. I am Humbert and Lolita. I am you. If you read these pages and think I'm the way I am because I lived through a civil war, you can't feel my pain. If you believe you're not like me because one woman, and only one, Hannah, chose to be my friend, then you're unable to empathize. Like the bullet, I too stray. Forgive me.

Of course I received various permutations of the "Who will want to marry you if you read so much?" lecture, but I also had to endure the chilly "Don't try to be so different from normal people." Different from normal people? When I first heard that, I was sorely offended. I thought every person should live for art, not just me, and furthermore, why would I want to be normal? Why would I want to be stupid like everyone else?

Literatura e groapa mea cu nisip. E locul meu de joaca, in ea imi construiesc fortaretele si castelele, acolo petrec momente glorioase.

I read books—read, read, one can learn everything from books.

There should be a new literary resolution: no more epiphanies. Enough. Have pity on readers who reach the end of a real-life conflict in confusion and don't experience a false sense of temporary enlightenment.

Anna Karenina was the first time I allowed a book and its world into my house.

I am still more or less sane because of my evening reading.

I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I'm not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can life inside Alice Munro's skin. But I can't relate to my own mother. My body is full of sentences and moments, my heart resplendent with lovely turns of phrases, but neither is able to be touched by another.

I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.

I was a voracious reader, but after Hannah's death I grew insatiable. Books became my milk and honey. I made myself feel better by reciting jejune statements like 'Books are the air I breathe,' or, worse, 'Life is meaningless without literature,' all in a weak attempt to avoid the fact that I found the world inexplicable and impenetrable. Compared to the complexity of understanding grief, reading Foucault or Blanchot is like perusing a children's picture book.

the authors he has himself discovered are his own exclusive territory, like the saloon compartment of a special train.

The Works of Rabindranath Tagore consist of poems, novels, short stories, dramas, and essays that Bengali poet and Brahmo philosopher Rabindranath Tagore created over his lifetime. This ebook presents a collection of all major works of Tagore. A dynamic table of contents allows you to jump directly to the work selected.

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

You bookish little pervert.

I would like to be a D.H. Lawrence character, living in one of his novels. The people I meet don't even seem to have characters. And life seems so rich, when I look at it through his eyes, yet my own life very often appears sterile, like a bad patch of earth, as if nothing will grow there however hard I try.

literature has long since discovered and documented this place of which I thought myself to be the first inhabitant,…

so for most people the act of reading symbolised intelligence, quite possibly because in that formative time they had not enjoyed or understood the books that they were obliged to read.

As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition – I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another: in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

A lot of people want to be writers: there was no reason to think you couldn't buy your way into it.

Foi então que se lembrou de que, provavelmente, Vicente nunca lera o Machado... Nem nada do que ela lia.

Have you read Belondweg?" "I coudn't call myself much of a scholar if I hadn't," he said. He was adorable and he made me smile, but I couldn't let him see.