Quotes About Literature

So many good books to read, so little time!

I think it is good that books still exist, but they make me sleepy.

All these books and all the less time.

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

Nervous states of the worst sort control me without pause. Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it. I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an observer. I have no family feeling and visitors make me almost feel as though I were maliciously being attacked.

The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that makes us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, lost in a forest remote from all human habitation.

Si el libro que leemos no nos despierta de un puñetazo en el cráneo, ¿para qué leerlo?… Un libro tiene que ser un hacha que rompa el mar de hielo que llevamos dentro.

the blend of absurd, surreal and mundane which gave rise to the adjective kafkaesque

Like a dog! he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.

My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.

I have no literary interests; I am made of literature. I am nothing else and cannot be anything else.

Un libro dev'essere un'ascia per il mare ghiacciato che è dentro di noi.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?

Writer speaks a stench.

I am nothing but literature, and can and want to be nothing else.

I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even when they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me to my soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? (...) We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Ich glaube, man sollte überhaupt nur noch solche Bücher lesen, die einen beißen und stechen. Wenn das Buch, das wir lesen, uns nicht mit einem Faustschlag auf den Schädel weckt, wozu lesen wir dann das Buch? Ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns.

Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves.

Leo en Dostoievski el pasaje que tanto se asemeja a ser desdichado

O frio e o calor alternam dentro de mim com as palavras de uma frase, sonho com a expansão e a queda melodiosas. Leio frases de Goethe como se percorresse com todo o meu corpoa gama de entoações

los libros son códigos y es propio de este tipo de justicia que uno sea condenado no sólo inocente, sino también ignorante.

The most widespread individuality of writers consists, after all, in the fact that each conceals his bad qualities in an entirely particular way.

Um livro deve ser o machado para o mar congelado dentro de nós.