Quotes About Literature

Larentia, despite her extensive reading, was very ignorant about love

I believe that children in this country need a more robust literary diet than they are getting…. I will never talk down to, or draw down to, children.

I believe that children in this country need a more robust literary diet than they are getting. …It does not hurt them to read about good and evil, love and hate, life and death. Nor do I think they should read only about things that they understand. '…a man's reach should exceed his grasp.' So should a child's. For myself, I will never talk down to, or draw down to, children. (from the author's acceptance speech for the Caldecott award)

What do I love most? Working with words. Words in a sentence are like pieces of a puzzle; you try out a whole bunch, then turn them this way and that until they fit into the whole. Creating flow is crucial. There's nothing like the moment when, after working and reworking a sentence, everything falls into place, and you know that it's right. What I do love least? Touring. It's grueling, time-consuming, and lonely.

Proust said we read to know ourselves; there are many more selves to know than can come to light in our ordinary lives. When we and the writer meet on the page our silent communion crosses centuries.

Inside each book a warm-blooded human being is reaching out to us, and whether we are being entertained or enlightened we are never alone while reading.

Some June, for instance, when the rigors of the academic year are over, I would like to invite the women's studies scholars I know to a banquet where we would cook and serve things like Emily Dickinson's bread and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's pudding (the kind she was always asking Susan B. Anthony to cook for her so that she had time to write a speech).

Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.

I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.

She had always been an unashamed reader of novels.

Let me hasten to add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their stories in the first person, nor have I ever thought of myself as being like her.

Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends.

One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning.

She saw herself perhaps as an Elizabeth Bowen heroine - for one did not openly identify oneself with Jane Austen's heroines - and 'To The North' was her favourite novel.

As for his sudden change of heart, he had suddenly remembered the end of Mansfield Park, and how Edmund fell out of love with Mary Crawford and came to care for Fanny. Dulcie must surely know the novel well, and would understand how such things can happen.

She knew exactly how she ought to feel, for she was well read in our greater and lesser English poets, but the unfortunate fact was that she did not really like being kissed at all.

It was no doubt significant that Mary Beamish should have the novels of Miss Goudge while Piers had those of Miss Compton-Burnett,

People do seem to be ashamed of admitting that they read poetry,' said Jane, 'unless they have a degree in English—it is permissible then.

when she thought it over, Jane decided that she was really much more like Emma Woodhouse.

Miss Birkinshaw was like an old ivory carving, Prudence thought, ageless, immaculate, with lace at her throat. She had been the same to many generations who had studied English Literature under her tuition. Had she ever loved? Impossible to believe she had not, there must surely have been some rather splendid tragic romance a long time ago - he had been killed or dead of typhoid fever, or she, a new woman enthusiastic for learning, had rejected him in favour of Donne, Marvell and Carew.

He wrote the kind of books that nobody could be expected to read.

Me apresuraré a añadir que no me parezco en absoluto a Jane Eyre, que debe de haber hecho concebir esperanzas a tantas mujeres feas que refieren su historia en primera persona...

The lines on Rugby Chapel…I wish I could remember some of them now, but English Literature stopped at Wordsworth when I was up at Oxford, and somehow one doesn't remember things so well that one read since.

Prudence disliked being called 'Miss Bates'; if she resembled any character in fiction, it was certainly not poor silly Miss Bates.