Quotes About Literature

Such stories include Robert Heinlein's The Door into Summer, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man, Jack Finney's Time and Again, Frank Herbert's Dune and Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz.

There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. GEORGE WASHINGTON, address to Congress, January 8, 1790

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time — proof that humans can work magic.

His books were part of him. Each year of his life, it seemed, his books became more and more a part of him. This room, thirty by twenty feet, and the walls of shelves filled with books, had for him the murmuring of many voices. In the books of Herodotus, Tacitus, Rabelais, Thomas Browne, John Milton, and scores of others, he had found men of face and voice more real to him than many a man he had met for a smoke and a talk.

Shakespeare doesn't mean: we mean by Shakespeare.

El diccionario es el único libro ameno y reposante, cuya amable incoherencia, tan parecida a la de nuestra madre la naturaleza, nos hace descansar de la lógica, de las declamaciones y de la literatura.

Abby_Donovan: Heathcliff was a misogynistic asshole. MarkBaynard: Could you explain that to my Lit 101 class? I hate to see all those impressionable young females swoowing over him like he's Edward Cullen. Abby_Donovan: I've always been Team Jacob myself. And Team Mr Rochester.

I wish I could weep the way my teacher did as he read us Molly Bloom's soliloquy of yes.

Especially for upwardly mobile young females, declaring one's enthusiasm for Austen (whose heroines almost always move up in social and economic status as a result of the sterling marital alliances they form) has been a classic means of indicating one's purported good taste, good breeding, and good sense: I am an especially adorable member of the ruling class.

It is always reassuring to discover that great writers are as fallible as oneself. W.B. Yeats once failed to obtain an academic post in Dublin because he misspelt the word 'professor' on his application.

Enjoyment is more subjective than evaluation. Whether you prefer peaches to pears is a question of taste, which is not quite true of whether you think Dostoevsky a more accomplished novelist than John Grisham. Dostoevsky is better than Grisham in the sense that Tiger Woods is a better golfer than Lady Gaga.

That one can understand The Waste Land without even trying is consoling news for all students of literature.

It is said that an eighteenth-century bishop who read Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels threw the book into the fire, indignantly declaring that he didn't believe a word of it. He obviously thought that the story was meant to be true, but suspected that it was invented. Which, of course, is just what it is. The bishop was dismissing the fiction because he thought it was fiction.

The idea that literary theorists killed poetry dead because with their shrivelled hearts and swollen brains they are incapable of spotting a metaphor, let alone a tender feeling, is on of the more obtuse critical platitudes of our time.

Baa Baa Black Sheep' makes Marx's Capital look like Mary Poppins .

Književno obrazovanje ima mnogo vrlina, ali sustavna misao nije jedna od njih.

Literary figures have no pre-history. It is said that a theatre director who was staging one of Harold Pinter's plays asked the playwright for some hints as to what his characters were up to before they came on stage. Pinter's reply was 'Mind your own fucking business.

Once thought is pulled up short by a yearning that can only be known existentially, it is inevitable that conceptual discourse should give way to the birth of literature...

If literature matters today, it is chiefly because it seems to many conventional critics one of the few remaining places where, in a divided, fragmented world, a sense of universal value may still be incarnate; and where, in a sordidly material world, a rare glimpse of transcendence can still be attained.

At its finest, it has produced work of rare insight and originality. At its least creditable, it represents little more than the foreign affairs department of postmodernism.

You can enjoy books you do not admire and admire books you do not enjoy.

Those who can think up feminism or structuralism; those who can't apply such insights to Moby Dick or The Cat in the Hat.

Books were links that spanned such missing human bonds or even times of savagery and its resulting ages of ignorance.

This book was written using 100% recycled words.