Quotes About Literature

Ultimately, I want a peak experience in reading, and that is sometimes difficult to find in contemporary fiction. I'm not interested in books that are just clever and well executed; polish doesn't impress me, and I don't care about a merely capable sentence. Life is short; I want a confrontation with high art. I want soul. Great literature rattles the mind and makes the body sing. It's an unmistakable, electric feeling, and too rare. That is what I want.

They're constants, aren't they?" ... "Books are. That's why we like them so much. They seem immutable. They're not, of course. Not from the author's first draft to the tenth printing, but they seem like it.

This choice of symbol, too, is not arbitrary, but is documented by alchemical literature from the first to the eighteenth century. The lapis is produced, as we have already seen, from the splitting and putting together of the four elements, from the rotundum. The rotundum is a highly abstract, transcendent idea, which by reason of its roundness76 and wholeness refers to the Original Man, the Anthropos.

Jim Harrison's novels, John McPhee's nonfiction, Flannery O'Connor's short stories, and the crime novels of John Sandford, Ken Bruen, and T. Jefferson Parker. His books

Jim Harrison's novels, John McPhee's nonfiction, Flannery O'Connor's short stories, and the crime novels of John Sandford, Ken Bruen, and T. Jefferson Parker.

I fear I lose myself among books. I forget everything.

goodreads is epic

England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales might have been partners in an imperial project that required the projection of 'English Literature' as one of the defining elements of cultural superiority that justified the continuous extension of Empire throughout the nineteenth century, but they were also engaged in an internal struggle over the origins and the dynamics of that literature, and about the role of their national literatures within the consolidating discipline of English.

You can visualize this shift by using Google's Ngram Viewer2. This tool allows you to search Google's vast corpus of digitized books to see how often selected phrases turn up in published writing over time.

novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote a piece for the Guardian calling Twitter a "coercive development" in the literary world,

Un libro extenso es un gran mal.

Big book, big bore.

Mega biblion, mega kakon (Big book, big evil)

A poet's fiction should at least be plausible.

I don't think I've ever read a food piece or a food book.

La literatura no es una charada: es una actitud.

La verdad del escritor no coincide con la verdad de quienes reparten el oro.

Escuece darse cuenta de que las gentes siguen pensando que la literatura, como el violín, no hace daño a nadie.

Literature is a cake with many toys baked inside-and even if you find them all, if you don't enjoy the path that leads you to them, it will be a hollow accomplishment. There was a playwright named Heller, American, I believe, who summed it up this way. He said, 'They knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

I don't know if it becomes literature...I just know the two added words cause me to look at the ordinary sentences differently. And quite honestly, I find that to be magical!

Literature is unique. To understand literature, you read it with your head, but you interpret it with your heart. The two are forced to work together-and quite frankly, they often don't get along.

Sang Ly, we are literature—our lives, our hopes, our desires, our despairs, our passions, our strengths, our weaknesses. Stories express our longing not only to make a difference today but to see what is possible for tomorrow. Literature has been called a handbook for the art of being human. So

Sang Ly, we are literature—our lives, our hopes, our desires, our despairs, our passions, our strengths, our weaknesses. Stories express our longing not only to make a difference today but to see what is possible for tomorrow. Literature has been called a handbook for the art of being human. So, yes. It will do that.

Literature is a cake with many toys baked inside- and even if you find them all, if you don't enjoy the path that leads you to them, it will be a hollow accomplishment....'They knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.' p. 90