Quotes About Literature

This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being.

Wrapped in his coat, a book in his lap, the traveler took his ease, the hours slipping by unnoticed.

Vuole credere lei che sarei orgoglioso e felice di possedere un amico tra gli uomini? Ma fino ad ora ho avuto amici solo tra demoni, farfarelli, mostri oscuri e fantasmi afasiaci, vale a dire: tra letterati.

Literature is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.

Mas Hans Castorp replicou que preferia possuir os livros, e que a leitura era bem diferente quando o livro lhe pertencia; além disso gostava de sublinhar e assinalar certos trechos a lápis.

Miss von Osterloh had looked through it once during an idle fifteen minutes and pronunce it quite sophisticated, which veredict was her euphemism for inhumanly boring.

And he spoke now about the Word, about the cult of the Word, about eloquence, which he called the triumph of humanity. Because the Word was the glory of humankind, and it alone gave dignity to life. Not just humanism, but humanity itself, man's dignity and self-respect--they were inseparable from the Word, from literature.

If I can contradict you at all, if I can defend your own profession a little against you, it is not by saying anything new, but simply by reminding you of some things you very well know yourself: of the purifying and healing influence of letters, the subduing of the passions by knowledge and eloquence; literature as the guide to understanding, forgiveness, and love, the redeeming power of the word, literary art as the noblest manifestation of the human mind...

There are marriages whose raison d'être is beyond the grasp of even the most literary imagination. You have to accept them the way you put up with unbelievable couplings of opposites in the theater, such as old dodderers and vivacious beauties - relationships that are taken for granted and that form the basis for the mathematical structure of a farce.

A classic is a book that remains in print"—Mark Van Doren)

That is precisely why you will miss all the deepest meaning of Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest if you reduce their vital and creative statements about life and men to the dry, matter-of-fact terms of history, or ethics, or some other science. They belong to a different order.

The other loan was that of a book. The Headmaster came along, one day, and gave me a little blue book of poems. I looked at the name on the back. "Gerard Manley Hopkins." I had never heard of him. But I opened the book, and read the "Starlight Night" and the Harvest poem and the most lavish and elaborate early poems. I noticed that the man was a Catholic and a priest and, what is more, a Jesuit.

Had I ever read the Life of St. Bernard by Dom Ailbe Luddy?—

A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book, even though it may be about the love of God. There are many who think that because they have written about God, they have written good books. Then men pick up these books and say: if the ones who say they believe in God cannot find anything better than this to say about it, their religion cannot be worth much.

There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not.

You came to talk about the play, he said. Let me discourage you. It was written to entertain people. Like horror movies. It isn't literature, it doesn't mean anything. Wharfinger was no Shakespeare. Who was he? she said. Who was Shakespeare? It was a long time ago.

Remember that Puritans were utterly devoted, like literary critics, to the Word.

This mutual receptivity to each other's culture in the Middle Ages is now very much part of a long gone past. One revealing sign of today's lack of cultural receptivity to Western culture in the Middle East is that in today's Arab world— about 300 million people in more than 20 countries23— the number of books translated from other languages has been just one-fifth of the number translated by Greece alone, for a population of 11 million people.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Il piacere di leggere è doppio quando si vive con qualcuno che divide con te gli stessi libri.

This [Ulysses] is obviously the wave of the future, I'm glad I'm dying of tuberculosis.

The English language is damned difficult, but it's also damned rich, and so clear and bright that you can search out the darkest places with it.

E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He's a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain't going to be no tea.

You know the feeling that a great writer gives you: my spirit has been fed and refreshed; it has partaken of something new.