Quotes About Literature

cool? Yes, that's the word;

What's the use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book. Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.

Would that all excellent books were foundlings, without father or mother, that so it might be, we could glorify them, without including their ostensible authors.

A language has genius. Some works translate well, others are untranslatable. Molière is effective only in French. Without knowing Arabic nobody has ever understood the Koran. Pushkin remains a possession of the Russian people, though the world has acquired Tolstoy. In general, the higher the charge of peculiarly national identity and emotion, the less translatable a work is.

I think appreciating Dickens goes with ten thousand in the bank.

Judd sighed. I don't know why people take criticism so seriously. One good creator is worth all the critics who ever lived. Criticism is necessary to literature, Hawke said, and felt a fierce disgust with himself. It was as though he were trying to soothe a homicidal lunatic. Judd said, Nonsense, criticism is a minor form of entertainment, a sort of piggy-back writing that rides on other men's work.

Three thousand years have not changed the human condition in this respect; we are still lovers and victims of the will to violence, and so long as we are, Homer will be read as its truest interpreter.

For the more literal approach would seem to be too little English, and the more literary seems too little Greek. I have tried to find a cross between the two, a modern English Homer.

The Iliad, said Aristotle, is pathetic and simple; the Odyssey is ethical and mixed.

the English of the nineteenth or early twentieth century is no closer to Homeric Greek than the language of today. The use of a noncolloquial or archaizing linguistic register can blind readers to the real, inevitable, and vast gap between the Greek original and any modern translation. My use of contemporary language—rather than the English of a generation or two ago—is meant to remind readers that this text can engage us in a direct way, and also that it is genuinely ancient.

they arise from over-saturation with the Iliad.

La atmósfera es siempre el elemento más importante, por cuanto el criterio final de autenticidad de un texto no reside en su argumento, sino en la creación de un estado de ánimo determinado.

For ages past the Genius of Literature and the Genius of Art have walked together hand in hand. For the Goddess of letters is blind, and only she of Art can lend her sight.

And one woman wrote, in 1850, in the book Greenwood Leaves: "True feminine genius is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a perpetual childhood." Another book, Recollections of a Southern Matron: "If any habit of his annoyed me, I spoke of it once or twice, calmly, then bore it quietly." Giving women "Rules for Conjugal and Domestic Happiness," one book ended with: "Do not expect too much.

in Andrew Jackson's administration, collaborated with the South to keep abolitionist literature out of the mails in the southern states. It was the Supreme Court of the United States that declared in 1857 that the slave Dred Scott could not sue for his freedom because he was not a person, but property.

We need to create a culture in this country in which reading and resistance go hand-in-hand.

book doesn't want pity. Literature is a long game. There is no shame in living among the discarded. Obscurity can have its vivifying air, one of my author's successors liked to say.

Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.

Many fine books have been written in prison.

Each man's memory is his own private literature

You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature.

It's a library; only the stupid and the evil are afraid of those

God forbid that I should ever suffer the shame of publishing a book for money, or of having one of my family so demean themselves. How can one tell who might read it? No worthy book has ever been written for gain, I think;

but that the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape.