Quotes About Literature

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.

But I suspect the reported number of good novels this year is a result of 9/11 and all the other alarums of recent years. I think it set a certain gear into movement, unseen, silent, at the heart of many writers. Writers with children, writers with that hope of a peaceful century; a sort of literary battle stations. I was not surprised to hear Ali Smith describe her wonderful book The Accidental as a war book. Sebastian Barry, in interview with TMO (2005)

Dedication Epigraph

The literature on Hegel is fond of representing him as someone who had very particular ideas and opinions. That is not only false; Hegel would have found it embarassing.

Die Hegelliteratur stellt Hegel gern als jemanden dar, der ganz eigene Ideen und Meinungen hat. Das ist nicht nur falsch; Hegel hätte es peinlich gefunden.

In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.

Pleasing things: finding a large number of tales that one has not read before. Or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed. But often it is a disappointment.

I'm glad to know I will never live long enough to run out of books to read.

Like the vacationer who returns to a beloved summer house year after year, the addicted reader opens book three or four or eleven in a given series and is thoroughly at home in the locale—its by now familiar native characters, the verbal shrubbery and the narrative floorboards that occasionally creak.

For, so long as there are interesting books to read, it seems to me that neither I nor anyone else, for that matter, need be unhappy.

To read a book for the first time is to make the acquaintance of a new friend; to read it a second time is to meet an old one.

I don't mind citing a bad author if the line is good.

Cada época lee a sus clásicos de distinta manera. El lector encuentra en ellos los contenidos que le permiten aclarar su presente, resolver sus dilemas, vislumbrar con mayor claridad sus objetivos. Una gran obra trascenderá siempre las intenciones de su autor y las limitaciones de su tiempo

Rich people don't have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their 'work' is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention.

She remembered the lead ammunition in her pocket and offered it to him. "Your balls, Mr. Darcy?" He reached out and closed her hand around them, and offered, "They belong to you, Miss Bennet.

How pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!" "Spoken like one who has never known the ecstasy of holding a still-beating heart in her hand.

We pore through libraries, dissecting the classics" Henry Sturges- vampire

One: I am proud to say that my vampires do not sparkle. Two: I feel like in literature that we've gone [this way] towards the kissing vampires side of the needle. I think it's time we go back towards the killing vampires side of the needle.

I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these. What have we to do but stay indoors and read till the cure is at last discovered?

Seth Grahame-Smith

Dr. Atkinson thinks it was as far away as two thousand years ago that the Irish began to grace their then ancient poetic art with their new Invention of rhyme. From the Latin verses of Colm and other earliest Irish saints, we have positive proof that, anyhow, rhyme was in use in Ireland in the very earliest Christian times — both vowel rhyme (assonance) and consonantal rhyme called comharda.

It is difficult for us to realise that in the ancient Irish Schools of Poets the students were trained in not less than three hundred and fifty different kinds of metre.

The materialistic conception of nature did not go unchallenged during the nineteenth century, particularly in art and literature where the romantic movement sought to re-establish a more intimate bond with nature and the indwelling spirit within nature. The philosophical Romantic poets like Novalis devoted themselves most of all to the theme of nature and its significance for man.

Oh no he does not! He does NOT read James Freaking Patterson. Our salvation - our provider…we must be out of our minds. I happen to find Patterson thought provoking and suspenseful. You what? Did you just say you find James Patterson thought provoking and suspenseful? Jesus Christ open your eyes! Are you so desperate to believe that you're defending James Patterson?!