Quotes About Literature

Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes

Ao contrário do que dizem certos parisienses, o texto está aí não para dar prazer, mas o elevado desprazer ou prazer mais difícil que um texto menor não dará.

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, tuned the English tongue.

Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket

Our educational institutions are thronged these days by idealistic resenters who denounce competition in literature as in life, but the aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to all the ancient Greeks, and to Burckhardt and Nietzsche, who recovered this truth.

Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left.

only a few handfuls of students now enter Yale with an authentic passion for reading. You cannot teach someone to love great poetry if they come to you without such love. How can you teach solitude? Real reading is a lonely activity and does not teach anyone to become a better citizen.

A political reading of Shakespeare is bound to be less interesting than a Shakespearean reading of politics [.]

You cannot locate Shakespeare in his own works, not even in the sonnets. It is in this near invisibility that encourages the zealots who believe that almost anyone wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespeare himself.

I again recall provoking resentment by dubbing the American bard "a male lesbian," much as Shakespeare was when writing the sonnets.

Attempting to read many of the works set forth as resentment's alternatives to the Canon, I reflect that these aspirants must believe they have spoken prose all their lives, or else that their sincere passions are already poems, requiring only a little overwriting.

Without the Canon, we cease to think.

Dr. Samuel Johnson, who admired the novel with absolute conviction, famously remarked to Boswell, "Why, sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story…you would hang yourself….You must read him for the sentiment.

Everyone has, or should have, a desert island list against that day when, fleeing one's enemies, one is cast ashore, or when one limps away, all warfare done, to pass the rest of one's time quietly reading. If

Everyone has, or should have, a desert island list against that day when, fleeing one's enemies, one is cast ashore, or when one limps away, all warfare done, to pass the rest of one's time quietly reading.

I have received many nasty letters from neo-conservatives, who denounce me because I refuse to say that the function of studying canonical works is to reinforce our moral suppositions.

Clarissa Harlowe is a larger form than all the heroines of the Protestant will descended from her: Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, Anne Elliot; Hawthorne's Hester Prynne; George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke; Thomas Hardy's Sue Bridehead; Henry James's Isabel Archer, Milly Theale; D. H. Lawrence's Ursula Brangwen; E. M. Forster's Margaret Schlegel; and Virginia Woolf's Lily Briscoe.

Saint-Beuve, para mí el más interesante de los críticos franceses, nos enseñó a hacernos una pregunta crucial acerca de cualquier escritor al que leemos a fondo: ¿Qué piensa el autor de nosotros?

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.

Nothin's real scary except in books.

Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird ], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. [Open Letter, O Magazine , July 2006]

I'm Charles Baker Harris...I can read

In other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama