Quotes About Literature

You have to learn the language of Hamlet.

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.

I don't admire Freud as much as some people do. Imagine Shakespeare being aware of the Oedipal complex when he wrote Hamlet. It would have been a disaster.

The most enduring stories in literature generally have some kind of crime at their center, whether it's the bloody butchery of 'Hamlet,' the lecherous misanthropes of Dickens or the lone gunman from 'The Great Gatsby.'

Shakespeare's 'Othello' was inspired by Cinthio's 'A Moorish Captain'; his 'Hamlet' came from Saxo Grammaticus's 'Amleth.'

'Hamlet' is the most famous play in the world for a reason. The journey you go on is incredible.

Every time has its own 'Hamlet.'

My mom handed me my first romance novel.

A book is a gift you can read again and again.

A book is a gift you can open again and again!!!!!

I expected to include plenty of Whitman here and discovered, reading him, a sort of seasickness at all those undulating lines of Uncle Walt's perpetual swoon over grass and leaves and camerados. There are good poems there, and it's a mistake to omit them, but Walt is the Typhoid Mary of American Lit: so much bad poetry can be traced back to him (and not brief bad poems, either), he gave so many dreadful writers permission to lavish themselves upon us. Lord, forgive me.

Books help us anchor our souls, or re-anchor them; particularly for us, the left-handed, given the things we have to do.

Shakespeare knew too much.

There was John Masefield's The Box of Delights; and the C. S. Lewis Narnia books; and Patricia Lynch's The Turf-Cutter's Donkey; The Winter of Enchantment by Victoria Walker; Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken; several of Rosemary Sutcliff's historical novels, including Susan's favorite, The Silver Branch; Power of Three by Diana Wynne Jones; The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner; Five Children and It by E. Nesbit; and many others.

You know, there are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them. I mean, so what if two roads go two ways in a wood? So what? Who cares if it made all that big a difference? What difference? And why should I have to guess what the difference is? Isn't that what he's supposed to say? Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

You can't just skip the boring parts. Of course I can skip the boring parts. How do you know they're boring if you don't read them? I can tell. Then you can't say you've read the whole play. I think I can live a happy life, Meryl Lee, even if I don't read the boring parts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Who knows? she said. Maybe you can't.

Reading is not daily its a life style for all readers.

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be, to books.

Also, I've spent an entire week without reading any books or talking about them too loudly. I'm learning to work my apparat's screen, the colourful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors.

What if we just went home and read books to each other?

Every author who straddles culture is inauthentic in a way.

People who think literature should be Serious—should serve as a blueprint for a rocket that will never take off—are malevolent at best, anti-Semitic at worst.

The bookshelves were lined with Joan Didion and Flannery O'Connor, a small, unexpected collection of musicalia, essay collections on Leonard Cohen and Neil Young. There was a framed poster of an exhibit of romantic landscape paintings in Dresden. Intellectuals had their own thing going, that was for sure.

Jack [Kerouac] was, in a sense, a twentieth-century American mythographer. And that's why maybe those novels will stand up, because they will be one of the best statements of the myth of the twentieth century.