Quotes About Literature

Revolutions is a sublime of bad literature.

The worst reproach to be made against police states is that they oblige—for prudence's sake—the destruction of letters and diaries, i.e., what is least false in literature.

On devrait s'en tenir à un seul idiome, et en approfondir lamconnaissance à chaque occasion. Pour un écrivain, bavarder avec une concierge est bien plus profitable que s'entretenir avec un savant dans une langue étrangère.

Jaki? pisarz nie dlatego na nas oddzia?a?, ?e?my go du?o czytali, lecz dlatego ?e rozmy?lali?my o nim ponad rozs?dn? miar?.

Voltaire was the first literary man to erect his incompetence into a procedure, a method.

Poem, novel, essay, play—everything seems too long. The writer—it is his function—always says more than he has to say: he swells his thought and swathes it with words.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul--BOOKS.

There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away Nor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry – This Traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of Toll – How frugal is the Chariot That bears a Human soul.

What am I to give the housemaids here? and do you object to my reading novels, if Lady Eskdale says there is no harm in them? They look very tempting, particularly one called Pride and Prejudice.

I believe that there are no memories that are okay to forget. Every man's memory is his private literature. Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for a while, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never, ever the same Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose. Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That's why it's a comfort to go hand in hand.

And reading this way - with no deadline, no agenda - she remembered why she loved literature so much. It was like fucking a new man and knowing that he had made other women come, but that when she came it would be an unshareable, untranslatable pleasure. She opened herself up to her books, and the words got inside her and fucked her senseless.

Look at a railway stall; you see books of every color—blue, yellow, crimson, "ringstreaked, speckled, and spotted," on every subject, in every style, of every opinion, with every conceivable difference, celestial or sublunary, maleficent, beneficent—but all small. People take their literature in morsels, as they take sandwiches on a journey.

Books are for various purposes—tracts to teach, almanacs to sell, poetry to make pastry, but this is the rarest sort of book, a book to read.

On few subjects has more nonsense been written than on the learning of Shakespeare.

I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.

It will not, I suppose, be denied that the beauties of nature are at least as well qualified to minister to our higher needs as are the beauties of literature.

Beauty is an ill-defined attribute of certain members of an ill-defined class; and for the class itself there is no very convenient name. We might describe its members as "objects of aesthetic interest" always bearing in mind that this description (as I use it) applies to objects of the most varying degrees of excellence—to the small as well as the great, the trifling as well as the sublime: to conjuring and dancing; to literature, art, and natural beauty.

Love, as I conceive it, is a purely subjective poem. In all that books tell us about it, there is nothing which is not at once false and true.

That resplendent space created by a piece of fiction can really expand the width of time... Clearly there is a spot somewhere inside our heads they records that feelings we had when we read the book, and it stays with us forever.

That resplendent space created by a piece of fiction can really expand the width of time... Clearly there is a spot somewhere inside our heads that records the feelings we had when we read the book, and it stays with us forever

Ambiguity is the essence of Irish writing, I think.

We're all the people in our books. A few people who read Eclipse in manuscript said that they felt almost embarrassed because it seemed to be so personal. I suppose, in a way, it should be gratifying but I find it puzzling. I certainly didn't set out to write about myself. Physically, I'm entirely different from Cleave. I don't have the same attitudes - but maybe I did.

Irish English is a very different beast from English English or American English. Very different. The way in which Irish writers are only too happy to infuse their language with ambiguity is very different. An English writer will try to be clear. Orwell said that good prose should be like a pane of glass. The Irish writer would say: 'No no, it's a lens, it distorts everything.'