Quotes About Literature

The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.

The prototypic Don Juan, invented early in the XVI century by a Spanish monk, was

I am sorry to say that it is a common practice with romancers to announce their hero as a man of extraordinary genius, and to leave his works entirely to the reader's imagination; so that at the end of the book you whisper to yourself ruefully that but for the author's solemn preliminary assurance you should hardly have given the gentleman credit for ordinary good sense.

Wilde's permanent celebrity belongs to literature, and only his transient notoriety to police news.

Literature is too full of 'acknowledgments' and squabbles about originality...

Spisovate? je ?lovek, ktorému nesta?ia knihy tých druhých.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you wouldn't read yourself.

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

I shall be so glad if you will tell me what to read. I have been looking into all the books in the library at Offendene, but there is nothing readable. The leaves all stick together and smell musty. I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one's own taste instead of reading other people's! Home-made books must be so nice.

I sow all sorts of seeds, and get no great harvest from any one of them. I am cursed with susceptibility in every direction, and effective faculty in none. I care for painting and music; I care for classic literature, and mediæval literature, and modern literature; I flutter all ways, and fly in none.

Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations.

Oh, he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains.

One way to approach the book today might be to think of it not as an intimidating, monolithic entity, but as its original readers experienced it—as eight utterly manageable short books to be read over the leisurely course of a year. Another way might be to admit that you do have time to read an eight-hundred-page book, perhaps even according to a swifter timetable than that of George Eliot's first readers. You just need to reorder your priorities.

I have a hyperbolical tongue: it catches fire as it goes. I dare say I shall have to retract.

There is correct English: that is not slang. I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

I think there is more than enough literature of the criticizing sort...To read much of it seems to me seriously injurious: it accustoms men and women to formulate opinions instead of receiving deep impressions, and to receive deep impressions is the foundation of all true mental power.

I wonder how girls manage to fall in love. It is easy to make them do it in books. But men are too ridiculous. Gwendolen Harleth

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Silas Marner was the third novel written by George Eliot and it was first published in 1861 by William Blackwood and Sons, of Edinburgh and London. It has been a highly successful book, demonstrated by the many adaptations it has generated through the years. As early as 1876 saw the release of the play Danl'l Druce, Blacksmith, by W.S Gilbert, which was clearly influenced by Eliot's novel with a similar beginning and end

Sometimes Maggie thought she could have been contented with absorbing fancies; if she could have had all Scott's novels and all Byron's poems!–then, perhaps, she might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life.

In 1847, a certain Count Leopold Ferri died at Padua, leaving a library entirely composed of works written by women, in various languages, and this library amounted to nearly 32,000 volumes.

I have always believed that a human being could withstand almost anything if he were just allowed to read.