Quotes About Literature

A Christian message or moral cannot redeem a text marred by shoddy workmanship.

wildflower pressed into the page reading "Tintern Abbey." Jerry had marked a passage: If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance

Suggested Reading Louis Bayard, The Black Tower; Sarah Blake, Grange House; F. G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls; Michael Cox, The Glass of Time; Mark Frost, The List of Seven; John Harwood, The Ghost Writer; Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale.

She buried herself so deep in the book no harm could ever find her.

I can always be tempted by a library.

I think literature reveals more about us than history does.

The best fiction is history

No white person I met in the South would say their distaste for Obama was a function of racism. I don't agree with his liberal policies, they'd tell me. But disagreement is not hatred, and a growing body of literature argues that racism was the deciding factor in the 2016 election.

I can imagine a future in which real books will exist but in a more limited, particular way.

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It's like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: They take on a kind of human vitality.

I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived. It wasn't like going to a store with my mom, which guaranteed a tug-of-war between what I wanted and what my mother was willing to buy me; in the library I could have anything I wanted.

I am happy if I can give them away or donate them. But I can't throw a book in the trash, no matter how hard I try.

The next morning, close to two thousand people showed up at the library.

I wanted to have my books around me, forming a totem pole of the narratives I'd visited.

It is as if the city has a bloodstream flowing through it, oxygenated by books.

The temperature reached 451 degrees and the books began smoldering.

Throughout her life, Warren published little tip sheets—"Althea's Ways to Achieve Reading"—to encourage people to find time for books. She approved of fibbing if it gave you an additional opportunity to read.

they also believed that you read a book for the experience of reading it. You didn't read it in order to have an object that had to be housed and looked after forever, a memento of the purpose for which it was obtained. The reading of the book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs.

you read a book for the experience of reading it. You didn't read it in order to have an object that had to be housed and looked after forever, a memento of the purpose for which it was obtained.

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory.

Interest in having a library in town persevered, and in 1872, an association formed to establish a library in the city. To raise money, the association sponsored a "Dickens Party," which partygoers attended dressed as their favorite Charles Dickens character. The party lasted for a full week. Hints to Horse-keepers and On the Sheep Industry were purchased with proceeds of the party.

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It's like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something wose than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

bookshelves-full-of-books family.