Quotes About Literature

I keep three kinds of books: those I want to read, those I want to reread, and those I want to reopen just to confirm how bad they are.

A room more clearly meant to delight the heart of a bibliophile I could not imagine.

En el colegio llevaba siempre un libro consigo. Cuando las cosas se ponían difíciles, el peso de la mochila la consolaba. Le ayudaba saber que el libro estaba allí, esperándola. En varios momentos del día, sentía los bordes dándole en el muslo, recordándole su existencia. Era como tener un amigo cerca diciéndole: «Sigo aquí y podemos pasar tiempo juntos más tarde».

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper—whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

I now remembered that Mrs. Todd had told me one day that Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading.

I am grateful to the men and women who create books, and I forgive the men and women who make books necessary." — VOICE AT QUAKER MEETING, Peterborough New Hampshire

Elizabeth Brown prefered a book to going on a date. While friends went out and danced 'till dawn, she stayed up, reading late.

It's always so cool to think you are looking at today is something other people have been looking at for centuries. It's the closest I've come to touching immortality, by reading the words of dead people.

Mike only laughed. "'Methinks the lady doth protest too much.'" Gigi - "Methinks that is the only Shakespeare line thou doth know.

It had three or four book-cases, all of them very full, and a rack of wands, with newspapers and magazines hung out upon them like dripping laundry.

You have been too long among your uncle's books. Girls love easily, there. That is the point of them. If they loved so in life, the books would not have to be written.

We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.

But really it says everything that's wrong about the publishing industry, that a quarter of a million people bought and read a sex and shopping novel that wasn't even written by one of those footballer girlfriends, and yet most of the shortlisted titles on the Orange Prize, which is an award for women writers, don't even sell ten thousand copies. It's just not right.

You took out a book on blow-job technique from the British Library? They shouldn't have books like that in there!

I don't have the prejudices many have today. I don't believe in a naturalist worldview. I don't base my thinking on prejudices or a worldview and do not believe in materialism- (From an interview as cited in the Book the Literature of Possibility by Tom Butler-Bowden).

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

I have always had a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text.

Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad to read him.

A writer is a reader moved to emulation.

The men who pile up the heaps of discussion and literature on the ethics of means and ends... are passionately committed to a mystical objectivity where passions are suspect. They assume a nonexistent situation where men dispassionately and with reason draw and devise means and ends as if studying a navigational chart on land.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.

Flannery O'Connor—it's right, but it ain't right enough.

Christopher Rowland, who has plumbed apocalyptic literature as well as anyone in the modern era, counters much of the common interpretation of Revelation when he says, "We should not ask of apocalypses, what do they mean? Rather, we should ask, how do the images and designs work? How do they affect us and change our lives?