Quotes About Literature

It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt...

Kitaplar bize ne tür eÅŸekler ve aptallar olduÄŸumuzu hat?rlatmak içindir. Kitaplar, tören alay? büyük bir gürültü içinde caddede ilerlerken, Sezar'?n kula??na 'Unutma, Sezar, sen de ölümlüsün' diyen pretoryen muhaf?zlar?d?r.

Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan.

They read the long afternoon through, while the cold November rain fell from the sky upon the quiet house.

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of a well-read man?

Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.

You can't ever have my books.

He] was always here to offer cups of good clear Walden Pond, or shout down the deep well of Shakespeare and listen, with satisfaction, for echoes. Here the lion and the hartebeest lay together, here the jackass became a unicorn.

The thing that makes me happy is that I know that on Mars, two hundred years from now, my books are going to be read. They'll be up on dead Mars with no atmosphere. And late at night, with a flashlight, some little boy is going to peek under the covers and read The Martian Chronicles on Mars.

His flesh took paleness from his bones.

You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.

We do need knowledge. . . Most of us can't rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.

For, let's face it, digression is the soul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

Me? I'm the original sad man. I read a book and it makes me sad. See a film: sad. Plays? they really work me over.

You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.

We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ, it's here. And the hour's late. And the war's begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors.

The things you're looking for...are in the world, but the only way the average chap will see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book.

The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.

The things you are looking for, Montag, are in the world but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Do you know why books such as this are so important? They have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me, it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass screaming past an infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper the more literary you are. That's my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves -- you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

After all, each story is a Rorschach Test, isn't it? And if people find beasties and bedbugs in my ink-splotches, I cannot prevent it, can I? They will insist on seeing them, anyway, and that is their privilege. Still, I wish people, quasi-intellectuals, did not try so hard to find the man under the old maid's bed. More often than not, as we know, he simply isn't there.

The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are... The good writers touch life often.

Le cose che voi cercate, Montag, sono su questa terra, ma il solo modo per cui l'uomo medio potrà vederne il novantanove per cento sarà un libro.