Quotes About Literature

Like so many of the other books I read, it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I had lived in, had visited and would visit again, just as all the people in them, every blessed one – Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Jay Gatsby, Elizabeth Bennet, Scarlet O'Hara, Dill and Scout, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot – were more real than the real people I knew.

I lived within the cover of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.

Part of the great wonder of reading is that it has the ability to make human beings feel more connected to one another, which is a great good, if not from a pedagogical point of view, at least from a psychological one.

Who says great literatue has to be written by men? Who says great literature has to be about scary, creepy stuff like adulterers being punished and black slaves breaking loose and giant whales eating people? Why can't literature just be stories about women? Refined, respectable women have just as much to say as ignorant black slaves or bloodthirsty Indians or mad white whaling captains. Why do we have to pretend those people's lives matter more than our own?

For those of us who suspect all the mysteries of life are contained in the microcosm of the family, that personal relationships prefigure all else, the work of Jane Austen is the Rosetta stone of literature.

Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel. Or maybe they just help me while away the hours as the rain pounds down on the porch roof, taking me away from the gloom and on to somewhere sunny, somewhere else.

All of reading is really only finding ways to name ourselves, and, perhaps, to name the others around us so that they will no longer seem like strangers. Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel.

even the outright deletions that Ayn Rand's editor should have taken care of).

My home was in that pleasant place outside Philadelphia, but I really lived somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.

Perhaps we women are more willing to break the ice. Two things that made this possible most often in many of our lives were intimate friendship and reading.

Reading is my favorite occupation. When I have leisure for it and books to read.

?itanje je moje najdraže zanimanje, kada za to imam slobodnog vremena i knjiga koje bih ?itala.

To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light is, doubtless, the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers?

My object in writing the following pages, was not simply to amuse the Reader, neither was it to gratify my own taste, nor yet to ingratiate myself with the Press and the Public: I wished to tell the truth, for the truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.

His books commingled democratically, united under the all-inclusive flag of Literature. Some were vertical, some horizontal, and some actually placed behind others. Mine were balkanized by nationality and subject matter.

On her ideal dinner party: 'Virginia Woolf, Coleridge and Charles Lamb would have to be there. I would be scurrying around in the kitchen with Mary Lamb - she and I would do the cooking. Of course my brother would be there. I think that's about enough. That number would sustain a single conversation. Virginia and I would be the centre of attention.

our father used to tell us stories about a bookworm named Wally. Wally, a squiggly little vermicule with a red baseball cap, didn't merely like books. He ate them.

He would surely have agreed that we were alike where it really counted: we were both hard-core devotees of what I call You-Are-There Reading, the practice of reading books in the places they describe.

Shakespeare was an anti-Semite

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly in hand before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

It's an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I - nor for that matter anyone else - will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old school girl.

Escrever um diário é uma experiência realmente estranha para uma pessoa como eu. Não só porque nunca escrevi nada antes, mas também porque me parece que, mais tarde, nem eu nem ninguém estará interessado nos devaneios de uma rapariga de treze anos.

Father emptied a card file for Margot and me and filled it with index cards that are blank on one side. This is to become our reading file, in which Margot and I are supposed to note down the books we've read, the author and the date.

let my own children read her books