Quotes About Literature

Whenever we read a book we love, we change it, to some extent. We read into it our own interpretations, and the meanings which the words have taken on in our time. If a book is so rigid that it cannot lend itself to these fluctuations, it is useful only while it seems strictly true, and afterwards it is completely out of date.

Careful, Arturo Bandini: don't strain your eyesight, remember what happened to Tarkington, remember what happened to James Joyce.

I went to the library and found again the books that had changed my life: Sherwood Anderson, Jack London, Knut Hamsun, Dostoevsky, D'Annunzio, Pirandello, Flaubert, de Maupassant. The welcome they gave me was much warmer than the cold curiosity of old friends I met in the town.

Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors.

My freind is the man who gives me a book I aint read."Abraham Linclion

And yet, in books were comfort and diversion; and they were wanted!

To put the last point another way, writers such as Graves, Sassoon, and Owen saw the Great War as the disease, but Tolkien saw it as merely the symptom.

Tell me my copy is missing the last twenty pages or something. Hazel Grace, tell me I have not reached the end of this book. OH MY GOD DO THEY GET MARRIED OR NOT OH MY GOD WHAT IS THIS?!

Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

Have you really read all those books in your room?" Alaska laughing- Oh God no. I've maybe read a third of 'em. But I'm going to read them all. I call it my Life's Library. Every summer since I was little, I've gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read.

As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

Here Greek and Roman find themselves alive along these crowded shelves; and Shakespeare treads again his stage, and Chaucer paints anew his age.

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

In Israel the sections of the Pentateuch that have in the past been considered as laws could now be considered as not carrying the obligatory force of legislation (if it is true that in conjunction with the literature from the ancient Near East these are not laws or legislation). They nevertheless do carry obligatory force for Israel as stipulations of the covenant.[1]

I don't write like this in order to show how clever and well read I am--though I am rather clever and well read as a matter of fact.

A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.

Sounding frank, honest, and sincere is, of course, a rhetorical strategy in itself, known from ancient literature as parrhesia. It's often employed by liars.

All forms of literature are dangerous; but in none is the danger more acute than in historical fiction...

tenía un cabello casi negro azabache.

I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.

At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

I have good reason to be content, for thank God I can read and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.

We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.