Quotes About Literature

The difference, Gopal told the Rationalists, between the Science Association and their own society was that they did not consider science alone, something people pursued in the seclusion of laboratories, important in itself. He himself was studying not science but English literature. Their aim was the application of rational principles to everything around them—to their own lives, to society, to religion, to history. It didn't matter what.

at exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics and literature alike.

In a short story by Chekhov or a novel by Balzac he found mysteries which, so far as he was aware, did not exist in any spy thriller. 35

Kad sam bio dijete, nadao sam se da ?u kad odrastem postati knjiga. Ne književnik, nego knjiga. Ljude se može pobiti kao mrave, pa ni književnike nije teško ubiti. Ali za knjigu, ?ak i ako je sustavno unište, postoji šansa da se neki primjerak spasio i da ?e nastaviti živjeti na polici, živjeti nijemim životom na nekoj od zaboravljenih polica u nekoj zaba?enoj knjižnici, u Rejkjaviku, Valladolidu ili Vancouveru.

books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic.

se refieren al versículo «he encontrado que la mujer es más amarga que la muerte»26

Literature and gossip are closely related. People who are curious and imaginative long to know 'what it's like for other people.' This longing can be satisfied in its basest, most banal form through gossip, just as it can attain a more refined and complex gratification in art. Both gossip and literature, each in its own way, are capable of offering a partial antidote to fanaticism, because they both relish the fascinating differences between people.

What surrounded me did not count. All that counted was made of words.

At the very least literature should not preen itself on mocking us and picking at our wounds, as modern writers in our days do ad nauseam. All they can write is satire, irony, parody (including self-parody), vicious sarcasm, all steeped in malice.

Lo que me rodeaba no me interesaba. Todo lo que me interesaba estaba hecho de palabras.

The Golden Notebook

The word literature enters the room with its nose in the air. But get it in a corner, ask the right questions, and it will reluctantly fess up to its humble origins. It hails from the Latin litterae, you whisper in your date's ear. It puts on a big act, but it literally just means "things made of letters.

I often reread passages of Lolita for its exquisite language. To me, Lolita has no message, no purpose, other than to exist as a marvel of literary creation. It has wit, intelligence and style. It pointedly makes no attempt to serve a higher moral purpose, and previous attempts by critics to find one have proven ludicrous. The annotated edition is accompanied by a brilliant afterword by Nabokov that is a lucid reminder of the pure joy of writing, its interplay with life.

When you read about the lives of other people, people of different circumstances or similar circumstances, you are part of their lives for that moment. You inhabit their lives, and you feel what they're feeling, and that is compassion. If we see that reading does allow us that, we see how absolutely essential reading is.

old books -- little tombstones of ideas and history

Las personas libres jamás podrán concebir lo que los libros significan para quienes vivimos encerrados.

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.

Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.

Men can be in love with literary figures, with poetic and mythological figures, but let them meet with Artemis, with Venus, with any of the goddesses of love, and then they start hurling moral judgments.

I was sure the old man knew nothing about the beatitudes, ecstasies, dazzling reverberations of sexual encounters. Cut out the poetry was his message. Clinical sex, deprived of all the warmth of love—the orchestration of all the senses, touch, hearing, sight, palate; all the euphoric accompaniments, back-ground music, moods, atmosphere, variations—forced him to resort to literary aphrodisiacs.

I will cover the walls with words. It will be la chambre des mots.

Literature, the ultimate gift for expressing the most subtle aspects of man's thought and feeling, may not survive persecution: first by religion, then by the bourgeoisie, then by Marxism, and now by commercialism. The

Read the Golden Ass of Apuleius and Les Diaboliques in French." . . . "Go to Russian Church on Rue Crimée for the music." . . . "Get back the first volume of Albertine and make annotations . . . write copiously, there is time for everything" . . . "Read Jacques Maritain.

He is dissecting poetry. It has become a cadaver.