Quotes About Literature

I love books! I love that moment when you open one and sink into it you can escape from the world,into a story that's way more interesting than yours ever will be

Greeks were so much a part of the Roman world that, in the surviving texts, they are often more visible by the shadow they cast than by their actual written presence.

It's not my job to make readers know what's a narrative voice and not the private view of the author," and that alone made me glad I had come.

Leer mala literatura es como comer comida basura

It's not my job to make readers know what's a narrative voice and not the private view of the author

She almost had no preference for any kind of book, and she had sometimes thought that odd; she had read Shakespeare and the thrillers of Sharon McDonald, and biographies of Samuel Johnson and different playwrights, silly romance novels, and also—the poets. She thought, privately, that poets just about sat on the right hand of God.

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.

Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.

Few students or teachers were interested in Cicero or Erasmus's other literary heroes. There was, however, a new teacher at Magdalen College named John Colet, who had immersed himself in the humanism coming out of Italy and its Platonist themes. He and Erasmus found an instant harmony. In listening to Colet speak, Erasmus wrote later, he "seemed to be listening to Plato himself."14

It was also Colet who suggested to Erasmus that he fuse his two interests, the Bible and ancient literature, into one. He urged him to do for ancient Christian literature, including the New Testament, what Ficino had done for Plato: use the techniques of philology to produce a clean, definitive text free from copyists' errors and scholastic muddles, a "pure Scripture" that would show people what the Bible really said, not what tradition or the allegorists said it meant.

When the Ostrogoths had swept into Italy, Theodoric looked for the best and brightest Roman for advice on how to govern. He turned to Boethius. For nearly two decades, Boethius had acted as Theodoric's chief political adviser and mentor—his surrogate father, almost. Theodoric was dazzled by Boethius's shrewd advice, by his icy calm in times of crisis, but above all by his knowledge of Greek literature, philosophy, and science.

This then was English fiction, this was English criticism, and farce, after all, was but an ill-played tragedy.

I had a good classical education, and a positive distaste for business of any kind; that was the capital with which I faced the world [...] I reflected, then, on my want of prospects, and I determined to embark in literature. - Really; that was strange. You seem to be in pretty comfortable circumstances, though.

Here lay hidden the secret of the sensuous art of literature; it was the secret of suggestion, the art of causing delicious sensation by the use of words.

Old poetics played a large part in my alchemy of the word.

For a long time I found the celebrities of modern painting and poetry ridiculous. I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, mountebanks backcloths, inn-signs, cheap colored prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, pornographic books badly spelt, grandmothers novels, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms.

J'aimais les peintures idiotes, dessus de portes, décors, toiles de saltimbanques, enseignes, enluminures populaires ; la littérature démodée, latin d'église, livres érotiques sans orthographe, romans de nos aïeules, contes de fées, petits livres de l'enfance, opéras vieux, refrains niais, rythmes naïfs.

The little honesty that exists among authors is discernible in the unconscionable way they misquote from the writings of others.

... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them. (Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)

that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them. (Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)

GROSSET & DUNLAP Publishers New York

One can never have too many books. Or read too many books.

Don Quixote's 'Delusions' is an excellent read - far better than my own forthcoming travel book, 'Walking Backwards Across Tuscany.'

The Romantic poets were the prototype ramblers, and I've often found myself following in their footsteps - although perhaps not all of their footsteps since a typical walk for Samuel T. Coleridge might last two days and cover 145km.