Quotes About Literature

Charles Dickens was born in England in 1812. He is one of the most famous writers of all time.

And of a superior quality—as demonstrated by an unnamed "literary test subject" who, in July 1903, while living in a hotel in Washington, D.C., subsisted on a glass of milk and four Fletcherized corn muffins a day. It was a maximally efficient scenario. At the end of eight days, he had produced sixty-four thousand words, and just one BM.

I]t is really the ponderous books which I envy. How easy merely to put down everything you think or imagine. No holding back, no telling oneself that this does not belong, or that. No hewing to the line. No cutting. No fear of letting the interest die. No wastebasket. How wonderful. And how dull!

I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I learn less and less from them that helps me to ponder my life. In time, I found myself agreeing with the course evaluations written by my testier freshman students:'All the literature we read this term was depressing.' How naive. How sane.

My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading.

I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books. They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection.

The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favourite authors

I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.

CREATED by an eighteen-year-old girl during the freakishly cold, rainy summer of 1816 while on holiday in Switzerland with her married lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and two other writers, the poet Lord Byron and John Polidori, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein would become the foundational work for two important new genres of literature—horror and science fiction.

I felt convinced that however it might have been in former times, in the present stage of the world, no man's faculties could be developed, no man's moral principle be enlarged and liberal, without an extensive acquaintance with books.

I have but one passion ; it swallows up every other ; it dwells with my darling books, and is fed by the treasures of beauty and wisdom which they contain.

On every point of general literature he displays unbounded knowledge, and a quick and piercing apprehension. His eloquence is forcible and touching;

I did not feel much inclined to study the books which I had procured at his recommendation. M. Krempe was a little squat man, with a gruff voice and repulsive countenance; the teacher, therefore, did not prepossess me in favour of his doctrine.

I read and studied the wild fancies of these writers with delight; they appeared to me treasures known to few besides myself.

And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more. But this is for myself; my readers have nothing to do with these associations.

Every book teaches a lesson, even if the lesson is only that one has chosen the wrong book.

Because of this. Because your funny. Because you know Lolita. And Nabukov and James Mason too. Because you're cute and funny and i'm kind of sad and you haven't tried hitting on me once. Because you weren't even trying...

A pataphor is an extreme form of metaphor that is used to express excitement. For example, "She swam with such grace that the water was left undisturbed by her tail." This pataphor describes a girl who swims as gracefully as a fish. Be

Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim

Smith's genius as an individual, but I have one great advantage over him – I can read his book.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

I'm a smeller of books and a marker-upper of books.

She tells me she's a certified smeller of books and that that is probably her best quality. "So It Goes." is tattooed on the inside of her left forearm.