Quotes About Literature

Had she read any good books lately? At all? She could tell him that she was going to take out a subscription at the library tomorrow because she was feeling starved of good reading material and could he recommend anything that she might not already have read?

In the Roman world, Ovid's Metamorphoses – that extraordinary mythological epic about people changing shape (and probably the most influential work of literature on Western art after the Bible) – repeatedly returns to the idea of the silencing of women in the process of their transformation.

A present of books is always an advantage in the country.

it seemed entirely possible to him that religion and literature and art and music were all merely side effects of a brain structure that comes into the world ready to make language out of noise, sense out of chaos. Our capacity for imposing meaning, he thought, is programmed to unfold the way a butterfly's wings unfold when it escapes the chrysalis, ready to fly. We are biologically driven to create meaning. And if that's so, he asked himself, is the miracle diminished? It

When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.

I exhale a highway of smoke and stare down it, then say, Each day has just been survival, just getting through, standing it. Don't you see how savage that sounds? Like, that's the way men in prison yards think. You live in a rich suburb and teach literature.

Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into. Lorrie Moore

Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. James Wood, How Fiction Works As

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. —William Matthews, "Mingus at the Showplace

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain Every

To promote a book so long after it's in print makes you—according to novelist Ian McEwan—an employee of your former self.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain

What small whiz-kid luster I'd given off in grade school had gone to mist starting my sunglassed junior year. I knew some Shakespeare plays, and I'd read a couple great books till their spines split.

But literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true part of the composite human record—that is, not words but a reality.

quickly found for myself two such blessings—the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place.

But, to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers. I would go so far as to say that, if one must make a choice between reading or taking part in a workshop, one should read.

Wherever I've lived my room and soon the entire house is filled with books; poems, stories, histories, prayers of all kinds stand up gracefully or are heaped on shelves, on the floor, on the bed. Strangers old and new offering their words bountifully and thoughtfully, lifting my heart. But, wait! I've made a mistake! how could these makers of so many books that have given so much to my life—how could they possibly be strangers?

I quickly found for myself two such blessings - the natural world, and the world of literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place.

He lives nowhere but on the page, and in the attentive mind that leans above that page.

Reading is the passport to countless adventures

Books were more valuable to him than gold.

William Shakespeare lived from 1564 to 1616. He wrote thirty-seven plays and many sonnets and other poems. Many people think he was the greatest writer who ever lived.

She waved a dinosaur book

Reading is the passport for countless adventures