Quotes About Literature

O moral Gower, this book I directeTo the.

She was a worthy womman al hit lyve,Housbondes at chirche dore she hadde fyve.

By God, if women had written stories, As clerks had within here oratories, They would have written of men more wickedness Than all the mark of Adam may redress.

Sometimes english masters make you read poems chiz chiz chiz. You have to sa the weedy words and speke them beatifully as if you knew what they meant. Fotherington-tomas thinks this is absolutely super and when he sa he wander lonely as a cloud you think he will flote out of the window.

The Bible is the one book we've most succeeded in having them never read as a book. Keep it that way.

Nowadays we already have books about books and descriptions of descriptions.

I would often rather read what a famous author has cut from one of his works than what he has let stand.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.

If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.

In his Comedy , Dante Alighieri names Virgil, with many tokens of respect, as his teacher, and yet as Herr Meinhard remarks, makes such ill use of him: clear proof that even in the days of Dante one praised the ancients without knowing why. This respect for poets one does not understand and yet wishes to equal is the source of the bad writing in our literature.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

Es asombrosa la cantidad de baratijas convencionales a las que recurrimos al expresarnos por impreso. La mayoría de los escritores asumen la expresión de quienes posan para el retrato de un pintor. Recorridos de la pose y el compromiso, escalón por escalón.

En cierta obra de un hombre célebre preferiría leer lo que tachó que lo que dejó.

El primer libro que habría que prohibir en el mundo sería un catálogo de libros prohibidos.

El único defecto de los escritores realmente buenos es que casi siempre ocasionan que haya muchos malos o regulares.

Es difícil que en el mundo haya mercancía más singular que los libros. Son impresos, vendidos, encuadernados, reseñados y a veces hasta escritos por gente que no los entiende.

The only literary men are those who have to work at it.

People must not be forced to adopt me as their favourite author, even for their own good.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

I recently bought a book of free verse. For $12.

We have watered our horses in Helicon.

Indeed, it required a nose both subtle and unprejudiced to understand and appreciate and thoroughly enjoy that Paris—not the Paris of M. le Baron Haussmann, lighted by gas and electricity, and flushed and drained by modern science; but the "good old Paris" of Balzac and Eugène Sue and Les Mystères—the Paris of dim oil-lanterns suspended from iron gibbets (where once aristocrats had been hung);