Quotes About Literature

I never thought that history would become one of my life's passions. I never even liked history when I was at school, apart from the context of literature, music, and art. But history has lately been revealed to me as the place where I live, where we all live, side by invisible side with others who - if we get quiet enough and listen carefully enough - will touch us and tell us their stories.

Books} are the bankers of the treasures of the mind.

His books distracted him for a while. They were like the aspirins you take when you've got a headache. They kill the pain for two hours and then it comes back.

Books are the carriers of civilization...They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

Books are humanity in print.

In writing I am seduced by the sound of words and by the interaction of their sound and sense.

It must always be an amazement how 18th century letter writers - even, and especially, officials - had the time and capacity to produce their sculpted sentences and perfection of grammar and mots justes , while 20th century successors can only envy the past and leave their readers painfully to pick their way through thickets of academic and the mud of bureaucratic jargon.

Marco Polo dictated his Travels in French,

Devout or not, all owned and carried Books of Hours, the characteristic fashionable religious possession of the 14th century noble.

by To Kill a Mockingbird. At the top of the nonfiction list was My Life in Court by Louis Nizer. That week also saw the publication of one of the finest works of history

was compared by Dante to both a slave and a brothel.

One English nobleman and statesman read and reread a particular work of literature because it was "the only book which allowed him to forget politics.

Suddenly, Walter was aware of all the things he did not know. There were hundreds--thousands--of books in the world, and he had read only a handful of them. One day he would die, a myriad of books unread, his knowledge of the world incomplete.

Dear Miss Pomeroy, I am saddened by the things I do not know. There are hundreds--thousands--of books in the world and I will never be able to read all of them. I am old. Walter

It is another advantage of history, that it stores the mind with facts that apply to most subjects which occur in conversation among enlightened people. Whether morals, commerce, languages, polite literature be the object of discussion, it is history that must supply her large storehouse of proofs and illustrations.

When you kill somebody in the movies, it matters, whereas in literature it can be allegorical.

My path is deeply littered with favorite poems.

Literary ladies may point to the primal mother as the first authoress; for a Gospel of Eve existed in the times of St. Epiphanius, who mentions it as being in repute among the Gnostics.

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.

In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence. But if you try that line in Europe, especially in France, they say, Oh, no! You're so English! I think I'm probably anchored somewhere in the Channel.

When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.

It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

Television didn't arrive in our household until I was about 10, so my imagination would have been first stirred by the printed word. Comics and the public library.

Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law in journalism, literature and art.