Quotes About Literature

Which demomstrates the sad poverty of English launguage...

Pen, ink, and paper are cold vehicles for the marvellous, and a "reader" decidedly a more critical animal than a "listener.

When you internalize an author whose vision or philosophy is both rich and out of fashion, you gain a certain immunity from the pressures of the contemporary. The modern world, with it's fads, propaganda, and advertising, is forever trying to herd us into conformity. Great literature can help us to remain fad-proof.

Writers are the engineers of the human souls

The writer is the engineer of the human soul.

Every man's memory is his private literature."- Aldous Huxley

A book ... unlike a television program, moving picture or any other 'modern means of communication' ... can wait for years, yet be available at any moment when it happens to be needed.

On evenings, I spent the entire study period reading.... From that time on, the world began to broaden around me, beyond any tangible limits. The world, as portrayed in those works destined for young people, was divided in two: an ordinary, everyday world, brutal and unresponding to desires, and a spacious, logical world, about all kind, interesting and desirable. Wasn't the very act of reading a pleasure more substantial than that of playing or eating, for instance, even when one was starved?

I was so enthused with literature -- not stuck on literature, but in love with letters -- that I was easily inclined to bring all the conversations round to works I had read or fictitious characters from my readings about whom I loved to talk

My Great-Grandma G, an avid reader, always said "a good book can take you anywhere you want to go". No need for passports, spending money, or travel insurance. Where are you off to next?

She's always loved writers, even more than the books I think. They're like personal friends to her.

There are far too many people born into the world, and far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought." "You sound constipated," said The Midget.

Alan Grant: "There are... far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought." The Midget (his nurse): "You sound constipated.

If one discards the Bible as unreliable historically, then he or she must discard all the literature of antiquity. No other document has as much evidence to confirm its reliability.

My whole thing is that I want to explore why you read books, what's the purpose of reading, and maybe that it's not that cool to hate something just because it's popular.

She'd only set my mouth, giving me her taste for called saints, good books, and angry men.

The average computer user of good faith who seeks regularly to read the news online now has to exercise the type of critical acumen that scholars of literature have always reserved for the analysis of texts: an intense engagement that seeks out secret meanings, hidden biases, hidden agendas. And what's more, our fictional average computer user of good faith who seeks regularly to read the news online has to do so even as the news reads him, or her, and modifies itself accordingly.

He was dismayed to find that his English—despite years of mandatory instruction in school, months of private lessons with a Bible studies PhD from Exeter visiting Israel to research Christ, repeated encounters with every episode of every season of Sex and the City (subtitled), sporadic encounters with Fast & Furious 1–6 (undubbed), and an aborted reading of the collected works of Sherlock Holmes (abridged)—sucked.

Forget the fictional characters – how many authors are being stopped on the street?

They said if you put a chimp in front of a typewriter, eventually he'd type Hamlet. But if you asked a chimp who the late Senator Thomas from Missouri was, he would never, in a billion years, say Eagleton.

I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.

Another well-known study, led by Nancy Andreasen, used structured interviews and matched control groups to examine thirty writers at the prestigious University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Eighty percent of the writers met formal criteria for a major mood disorder, compared with thirty percent of controls matched for age, education, and sex.

It was clear that people were not rushing to the shelves. In fact, I'd never seen anybody in a library pick up a small literary journal.

A novel wants to befriend you, a short story almost never.