Quotes About Literature

Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative.

I believe in books," her friend whispered. "We have to save them all.

Words. I had always loved them. I collected them, like I had collected pretty stones as a child. I liked to roll words over my tongue like a lump of molten honeycomb, savouring the sweetness, the crackle, the crunch.

Words. I had always loved them. I collected them, like I had collected pretty stones as a child.

Other people had religion to give them a connection to eternity, and good luck to them, but religion was too narrow for her, too unforgiving, too literal. Literature encompassed everything, forbade nothing, endorsed nothing. Writers, like scientists, had the greatest respect for the world as it truly was. Their job wasn't to judge but to examine, to experiment, draft after draft, century after century.

Kate Grenville

You see, if you ask an American how they are, they say fine, but if you ask a Russian, well, let's just say there's a reason why War and Peace is such a long book.

I come from the land where Anna Karenina was written. I believe in love, even if it is doomed.

That bird was a phoenix," Demerara said. "You'll know about them from those Henry Porter books.

Inquest juries frequently linked suicide to cheap literature. When a twelve-year-old servant boy hanged himself in Brighton in 1892, the jury delivered a verdict of 'suicide during temporary insanity, induced by reading trashy novels'. When a twenty-one-year-old farm labourer in Warwickshire shot himself in the head in 1894, the coroner suggested that the fifty penny dreadfuls found in his room had had 'an unhinging and mesmeric effect' upon his mind.

fifteen-year-old from Shepherd's Bush, West London, who had poisoned himself with carbolic acid. His father had given him a 'good hiding', the paper reported, because he had been out of work for a month. The boy left a note reading 'I wish you to know the reason I did it is because I could not work', but the judge none the less ascribed his death to his consumption of 'literary offal'.

In every other age and class man is held responsible for his reading, and not reading responsible for man. The books a man or woman reads are less the making of character than the expression of it.

Let's leave it for tonight. Is it a decent hour for two middle-aged people to go to bed?' He held out his hand for her. Half an hour later he exclaimed, 'My God, where did you learn that?' 'I read a book once,' she answered. 'Thank God for literate women,' he said fervently.

T]he moral seemed to be that one should always have Latin, or at least a good classical poetry quotation, to depend upon in great or desperate moments.

But when The Prince of Tides came out, thank God she was dead. I'm not sure I would have had the guts to publish that with her still alive.

When she'd read, her voice wrapped around my head and my heart, and it softened and lightened everything up. It put a pain in my hear that felt good.

Woodenly written, ineptly footnoted. It was so bad it was starting to make Connie angry. There often came a moment in grading when Connie struggled with anger at her students. That was usually when it was time to stop for the night.

To read means to borrow to create out of one's readings is paying off one's debts.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

You could compile, I should think, the worst book in the world entirely out of selecting passages from the best writers in the world.

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.

Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.