Quotes About Literature

The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw,' he said, 'was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws - this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos.

Harriet was going to be in the eighth grade next year; and what she had not expected was the horrifying new indignity of being classed-for the first time ever-a Teen Girl: a creature without mind, wholly protuberance and excretion, to judge from the literature she was given.

DOES SUCH a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

And yet I thought of him almost every day. The Russian novels I had to read for school reminded me of him; Russian novels, and seven pillars of wisdom, and so too the Lower East Side—tattoo parlors and pierogi shops, pot in the air, old polish ladies swaying side to side with grocery bags and kids smoking in the doorways of bars along Second Avenue.

In a certain sense, this was why I felt so close to the others in the Greek class. They, too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.

If one is to read Dante, and understand him, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature

I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out to write a novel to prove that, say, capitalism should crumble, then it's going to be a really bad novel. Very few people have been able to deal with political fiction - Dickens, Dostoyevsky. But even Tolstoy got really tiresome when he was talking about the serfs. You have to let characters be characters, not [gruff voice] Mr Capitalism or [girlie voice] Miss Anti-Fur.

Their lifelong love of learning, their remarkable wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was fostered primarily by their father. He read aloud to them at night, eliciting their responses to works of history and literature. He organized amateur plays for them, encourage pursuit of special interests, prompted them to write essays on their readings, and urge them to recite poetry.

Theodore) Roosevelt confessed early fascination with girls'stories such as Little Man and Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl.

A book," Nellie confided in her diary, "has more fascination for me than anything else.

Yet, however dissimilar their upbringings, books became for both Lincoln and Roosevelt "the greatest of companions." Every day for the rest of their lives, both men set aside time for reading, snatching moments while waiting for meals, between visitors, or lying in bed before sleep.

They would carry their books to the woods and read aloud to one another. At picnic lunches near Cooper's Bluff, they recited their favorite poems. "In the early days," Fanny recalled, "we all delighted in Longfellow and Mrs. Browning and Owen Meredith." Later, they turned to Swinburne, Kipling, Shelley, and Shakespeare. The Roosevelts

As ever, books remained a medium through which Theodore and Edith connected and interpreted larger world.

The young man never seemed to know what idleness was," marveled Cutler, "and every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic or some abstruse book on natural history in his hands.

Largely to gain Nellie's approbation, Will began to carry a book as a matter of course. "Trollope is a great favorite of mine because of the realistic every day tone which one finds in every line he writes," he told her. "His heroes have failings human character is heir to, and we like them none the less on that account.

Leaders in every field, Roosevelt later wrote, "need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.

every man to read the history of his country, "to appreciate the value of our free institutions," to treasure literature and the scriptures

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.

Yes, my child, you must read. You must read everything that comes your way. It doesn't matter what you read at first, later you'll learn discrimination. Schools are no good, Matty, you learn nothing at school. If you want to be anything, you must educate yourself.

But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: 'Of course I know nothing about German literature.' It is the mode. The Victorians knew everything about German literature, but were able with a clear conscience not to know much about the French.

Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.