Quotes About Literature

I'm not a fast reader. I like to linger over each sentence, enjoying the style. If I don't enjoy the writing, I stop.

If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.

I'm an average person. Is just that I like reading.

To be able to talk to your heart's content about a book you like with someone who feels the same way about it is one of the greatest joys that life can offer.

How about Proust's In Search of Lost Time? Tamaru asked. If you've never read it this would be a good opportunity to read the whole thing. Have you read it? No, I haven't been in jail, or had to hide out for a long time. Someone once said unless you have those kinds of opportunities, you can't read the whole of Proust.

Like a Chinese box, the world of the novel contained smaller worlds, and inside those were yet smaller worlds. Together, these worlds made up a single universe, and the universe waited there in the book to be discovered by the reader.

he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. That's the only kind of book I can trust, he said. It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature, he added, but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.

This was his favorite time of day, reading to his heart's content before going to sleep. When he tired of reading, he would fall asleep.

If you're looking for fine art or literature, you might want to read some stuff written by the Greeks. Because to create true fine art, slaves are a necessity. That's how the ancient Greeks felt, with slaves working the fields, cooking their meals, rowing their ships, all the while their citizens, under the Mediterranean Sun, indulged in poetry writing and grappled with mathematics. That was their idea of fine art.

My only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely life… Not that I knew what I wanted in life - I didn't. I loved reading novels to distraction, but didn't write well enough to be a novelist; being an editor or a critic was out, too, since my tastes ran to the extremes. Novels should be for pure personal enjoyment, I decided, not part of your work or study. That's why I didn't study literature

Whenever she came across lines she liked, she'd mark them in pencil and commit them to memory as if they were Holy Writ.

Nights without work I spent with whisky and books.

It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature, but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short. (...) If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That's the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that.

In the darkness, I returned to that small world of hers.

Devouring books came as naturally to us as breathing.

It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature, he added, but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.

She reads with great concentration. Her eyes rarely move from the pages of the book.

He was a far more voracious reader than me, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. That's the only kind of book I can trust, he said. It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature, he added, but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.

To be a Russian writer at the end of the nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably bitter fate. The more they tried to escape from Russia, the more deeply Russia swallowed them.

Io leggevo molto i libri, è vero, ma non leggevo molti libri, perché a me piaceva leggere più volte quelli che amavo […] Leggevo e rileggevo lo stesso libro molte volte, e a volte chiudevo gli occhi e mi riempivo i polmoni del suo odore. Il semplice annusare quel libro, scorrere le dita tra le pagine, per me era la felicità»

Si vous n'avez jamais lu Hamlet au cours de votre vie, c'est comme si vous l'aviez passée au fond d'une mine de charbon ».

When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out from between their pages – a special odour of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers>

in the 1970s people still referred to my mother as a Communist because she had a subscription to The Atlantic Monthly,

She tried to think about anachronism—what it means in literature, what it indicates about our confusion regarding the nature of space, our own persistent perishing—but found she was unable to hold on to the thought.