Quotes About Literature

I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.

Virginia Woolf helps. Her novels make mine possible.

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence.

I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason.

I am in danger of wanting my personal absolute to be a demigod of a man, and as there aren't many around, I often unconsciously manufacture my own. and then, I retreat and revel in poetry and literature where the reward value is tangible and accepted. I really do not think deeply. really deeply. I want a romantic nonexistant hero.

And I identify too closely with my reading, with my writing.

If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand: it has roads, detours, destinations; a heart line, a head line; morals and money come into it. Where the fist excludes and stuns, the open hand can touch and encompass a great deal in its travels.

You defy questions; You defy other godhood. I walk dry on your kingdom's border, Exiled to no good.

And just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf which I bought with a battery of her novels Saturday with Ted. And she works off her depression over rejections from Harper's (no less!—and I hardly can believe that the Big Ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock & sausage. Bless her. I feel my life linked to her, somehow. I love her.

conversing, in low tones, with the asylum librarian, an alumna

wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig tree. It

Buddy me decía que estaba leyendo poemas escritos por alguien que también era médico y que había descubierto que había un famoso cuentista ruso, ya muerto, que también había sido médico, así que era posible que los escritores y los médicos congeniaran.

Inertia oozed like molasses through Elaine's limbs.

Tudo o que eu já lera sobre gente maluca havia se fixado no meu cérebro, enquanto o resto evaporou.

Lifting the pages of the book, I let them fan slowly by my eyes. Words, dimly familiar, but twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse mirror, fled past, leaving no impression on the glassy surface of my brain.

I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason. So I'd skipped it. They let you do that in honors, you were much freer. I had been so free I'd spent most of my time on Dylan Thomas. A friend of mine, also in honors, had managed never to read a word of Shakespeare; but she was a real expert on the Four Quartets.

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

Do you know what a poem is, Esther?" "No, what?" I said. "A piece of dust.

Well, after this Racine paper, this Ronsard-purgatory, this Sophocles, I shall write: letters and prose and poetry, toward the end of the week; I must be stoic till then.

i have so many books i am perishing to read in my bookcase. hours-and-hours-and-hours- and hours.

digestible enough to be written out in short stories and poems, when I had a certain slickness that is enviable now

Perchè mi sento libera di scriverle [le parole]? La mia identità prende forma, si modella - sento che i racconti fioriscono mentre leggo la raccolta del New Yorker - sì, quanto i tempi saranno maturi, io sarò tra loro - le poetesse, le autrici.

Meanwhile, read Hopkins for solace.