Quotes About Literature

I will find your books and review with nastiness.

For whatever the power of truth may be, literature's own special power has always lain in fiction. That wonder we construct. It is the invention that unbreaks the heart and brings us into hope and peace and love.

Marcie, you don't need to read books. It's just a dumb habit for introverts.

Books Our Mother Loved" (here she placed Indiana and The Devil's Pool, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights), "Books Our Father Loved" (here she placed The Lady With the Dog and Other Stories, Great Expectations, and Twelve

Plays by William Shakespeare), "Books I Love" (here she placed Siddhartha, The Painted Bird, On the Road), "Books We Don't Understand Why People Like" (and here she put Peyton Place and Love Story and Hawaii). It

I could pull out a book and start reading, but reading on a bus usually gives me a headache. Besides, I'd look like a total dork. (Too bad, because I was in the middle of The Catcher in the Rye, which is wonderful.)

the Bobbsey Twins

Does any piece of writing speak for itself? Or do we impose certain values and judgements on that text when interpreting it?

There is now a large literature on the psychological benefits of meditation. Different techniques produce long-lasting changes in attention, emotion, cognition, and pain perception, and these correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain.

I wish I had water. I wish I had something to read.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

You can never be wise unless you love reading.

The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.

A man who writes a book, thinks himself wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind; he supposes that he can instruct or amuse them, and the publick to whom he appeals, must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions.

The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.

Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind, but in one composition.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

Volumes have been written only to enumerate the miseries of the learned, and relate their unhappy lives and untimely deaths. To these mournful narratives I am about to add the Life of Richard Savage...

Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerales.

Nor was his energy confin'd alone To friends around his philosophick throne; Its influence wide improv'd our letter'd isle. And lucid vigour marked the general style: As Nile's proud waves, swoln from their oozy bed. First o'er the neighbouring meads majestick spread; Till gathering force, they more and more expand. And with new virtue fertilise the land.

APHÆRESIS  (APHÆ'RESIS)   n.s.[   figure in grammarthat takes away a letter or syllable from the beginning of a word.

may, notwithstanding, be questioned whether, except his bible, he ever read a book entirely through. Late in life, if any man praised a book in his presence, he was sure to ask, "Did you read it through?" If the answer was in the affirmative, he did not seem willing to believe it.

Shakespeare regarded more the series of ideas, than of words; and his language, not being designed for the reader's desk, was all that he desired it to be, if it conveyed his meaning to the audience.