Quotes About Literature

This argument is not against adopting governmental educational policies for noble aims such as reducing inequality in the population, allowing the poor to access good literature and read Dickens, Victor Hugo, or Julien Gracq, or increasing the freedom of women in poor countries, which happens to decrease the birth rate. But then one should not use the excuses of "growth" or "wealth" in such matters.

One summer I decided to read the twenty novels by Émile Zola in twenty days, one a day, and managed to do so at great expense.

The way to remedy this is through meta-analyses of scientific studies, in which an überresearcher peruses the entire literature, which includes the less-advertised articles, and produces a synthesis.

Some books cannot be summarized; some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages.

so she could read it in the original.

We are talking about preventing our students from reading Huckleberry Finn! And why? Because it offends some people. Show me a book that offends no one, and i will show you a book that no one, in the whole history of the world, has ever willingly read.

El dar cuerda a alguien se decía en nuestra casa «dar cordel». Gino, efectivamente, daba poco cordel, porque siempre estaba leyendo, y cuando se le dirigía la palabra respondía con monosílabos y sin levantar la cabeza del libro.

Il romanzo è fra le cose del mondo che sono insieme inutili e necessarie.

You really have to love words if you're going to be a writer, because as a writer, you certainly spend a lot of time with words.

What is your suggestion for someone who wants to start writing? Be a reader. It's the only real way to learn how to tell a story.

Papa thought that any book worth reading twice was worth owning. So instead of buying desserts, we bought books.

I have always loved the feel of books, the way they give a literal weight to words and make of them a sacred object.

Frost wrote, "is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don't know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. . .

At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything.

You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own colour. This literary colouring is a protective one--like the brown of the rabbit or the checks of the quail--making it impossible for me to tell where literature ends and I begin.

The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.

A dead man sits on all our judgment seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh a dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos!

America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women

America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash--and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumberable editions of The Lamplighter (by Maria Susanna Cummins), and other books neither better nor worse? Worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the hundred thousand.

I had neglected to provide myself with books, and as we crept along at the dull rate of four miles per hour, I soon felt the foul fiend Ennui coming upon me

It came to pass, not long after the scene above recorded, that the Reverend Mr Dimmesdale, at noonday, and entirely unawares, fell into a deep, deep slumber, sitting in his chair, with a large black-letter volume open before him on the table. It must have been a work of vast ability in the somniferous school of literature.

The bookworm of great libraries.

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.

That little baggage hath witchcraft in her.