Quotes About Literature

I wasn't interested in society, or ancient people's money troubles. I wanted to know what books really meant.

I picked up a secondhand copy—$7.99—and read the text on the back: "Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically." My heart was pounding. There was a book about this?

It seemed possible that one or both of these books might change my life.

I understood that novels, unlike children's books, were serious and important and that, just as my parents' job was to treat patients in a hospital, so, too, was it someone's job to write novels. Every civilized country had such people. They were in some way the very mark of civilization.

It was hard to decide on a literature course. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that 19th century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.

One is never too young for fine literature . . .

nothing took precedence over reading; it was considered the holiest activity a person could engage in.

Anne Tyler is a goddess. I've been reading her since I was at uni and she has only gotten better.

mostly." He had majored in American literature at Fairleigh

She chastised herself and considered calling back, but in the end she had the good sense to return to reading Stephen Crane.

Cloudstreet, by Tim Winton; Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison; White Fur, by Jardine Libaire; and—oh, baby—Adultery and Other Choices, by Andre Dubus, who might be the writer Vivi loves most.

Poetry was made for the bath, Mitzi believed. She was partial to Pablo Neruda.

What is WIND and what is BONE have never been conclusively determined by the generations of Chinese critics, but what is certain, according to Liu Hsieh, is that the perfect combination or balance of WIND and BONE, the metaphor for the ideal poem, is a bird.

Chinese prosody is largely concerned with the number of characters per line and the arrangement of tones - both of which are untranslatable. But translators tend to rush in where wise men never, tread, and often may be seen attempting to nurture Chinese rhyme patterns in the hostile environment of Western language.

Sometimes in life, as in literature, people get their just desserts. The greedy man loses everything because he cannot resist seeking more riches.

That's the real mystery, isn't it? Not whether he was a common merchant or the queen's son, but how he could understand so much about human nature. And write about it in a way that still rings true, all these years later.' ". . . " 'That's Shakespeare's secret. . .

And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Ben, Whose fire-hearts sowed our furrows when The world was worthy of such men.

And Chaucer, with his infantine Familiar clasp of things divine.

No man can be called friendless when he has God and the companionship of good books.

The world of books is still the world.

A cheerful genius suits the times, / And all true poets laugh unquenchably / Like Shakespeare and the gods.

At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.

Good aims not always make good books.

Our Balzac should be flattered beyond measure by my thinking of him at all. Which I did, but of you more.