Quotes About Literature

Most of all, I think it was the novels that saved me from submission. I was young, but the first tiny, meek beginnings of my rebellion had already clicked into place.

Literature, as an institution par excellence of memory and a universally employed mode of human expression, untiringly explores ways of articulating who we are and of understanding both the incommensurability and the interconnectedness of our histories.

It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them. . .

Okurlar?n, gerçekten hangi ortamda yazd???m? gerçek yüzüyle öÄŸrenmek istediklerini sanm?yorum. Ama sormuÅŸsunuz, anlatay?m. Ortam mortam diye bir ÅŸey yok, ne demek ortam? Hiçbir Türk yazar?, yaz? yazmas? için ortam arayacak duruma gelmemiÅŸtir. Nerde, neresini, nas?l bulursak, orda yazmak zorunday?z.

Sixteen pages! Full sixteen pages! If you don't want to read, use it to make paper bags.Sell the paper pabs and earn a profit. Here comes today's Daily...

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

Every new book we read in our brief and busy lives means that a classic is left unread.

Literature need not answer every question it raises, but the questions themselves should be clear.

Oprah Winfrey told of calling Toni Morrison to say she had had to puzzle repeatedly over many of the latter's sentences. According to Oprah, Morrison's reply was "That, my dear, is called reading." Sorry, my dear Toni, but it's actually called bad writing. Great prose isn't always easy but it's always lucid; no one of Oprah's intelligence ever had to puzzle over what Joseph Conrad was trying to say in a particular sentence.

Great prose isn't always easy but it's always lucid.

Because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical.

If I might control the literature of the household, I would guarantee the well-being of Church and State.

The images of men's wit and knowledge remain in books, exempted from the worry of time and capable of perpetual renovation.

The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people who can write know anything. In general an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum.

The heart and passions of men are moved by things more within their attainment; the essential nature is stirred by the essential life; by the real actual existence of love, and hope, and character, and by the real literature which takes in its spirit, and which is in some sort its undefecated essence.

Why not leave the reading of great books till a great age? Why plague and perplex childhood with complex facts remote from its experience and inapprehensible by its imagination?

Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would promote more than one of them to the first.

Obama is a very fine writer with an excellent command of language. His memoir 'Dreams From My Father' is a fine book, but it will not rank as one of the great autobiographies.

The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang.

You can't be admitted to the ranks of writers of importance unless you have sales.

A novel is not a rant.

Moms in fiction and memoir get a bad rap.

Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.

I loved English and I tell kids that without English I wouldn't be able to rap.