Quotes About Literature

At the other end....was provided a deep and cushioned seat. Here, on the cushion, lay a folio tome, probably of the Chronicles of England, or other such substantial literature; even as, in our own days, we scatter gilded volumes on the centre-table, to be turned over by the casual guest.

The truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than most of his schoolmates or lifemates.

a bookworm-one of those men who are born to gnaw dead thoughts. His clothes, you see, are covered with the dust of libraries. He has no inward fountain of ideas... - Earth's Holocaust, Hawthorne

Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. […] A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skillfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.

Most of the kids I know read only manga, but I prefer novels. Novels are closer to real life than manga, it's like they show you the real world with one layer peeled away, a reality you can't see otherwise.

the deliberate application of the techniques of theater to politics, religion, education, literature, commerce, warfare, crime, everything, has converted them into branches of show business, where the overriding objective is getting and satisfying an audience.

Do you know that if you take the books in an average school library and stretched out all those words into a single line, the line would go all the way around the world? Actually, I made that up, but doesn't it sound like it should be true?

Fiction is all too often one rationalisation away from reality. (from the acknowledgements of Unwind)

he'd learned there was something very satisfying to the turning of pages, and—as Citra had already discovered—the emotional catharsis of slamming a book shut.

We are not the same beings we once were. Consider our inability to grasp literature and most entertainment from the mortal age. To us, the things that stirred mortal human emotions are incomprehensible. Only stories of love pass through our post-mortal filter, yet even then, we are baffled by the intensity of longing and loss that threatens those mortal tales of love.

Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.

Without literature, life is hell.

It was a joy! Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.

a good book can make an almost impossible existence, liveable ( from 'the luck of the word' )

I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me.

it does seem the more we drink the better the words go.

great books are the ones we need

Your writing, she said to me, it's so raw. It's like a sledgehammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness. . . .

Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it.

First paycheck I get, I thought, I'm going to get myself a room near the downtown L.A. Public Library.

and now sometimes I'm interviewed, they want to hear about life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed, shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say,look, look at this! but they don't understand, they say something like,you say you've been influenced by Celine? no, I hold the cat up,by what happens, by things like this, by this, by this!

And remember the old dogs who fought so well: Hemingway, Celine, Dostoevsky, Hamsun. If you think they didn't go crazy in tiny rooms just like you're doing now without women without food without hope then you're not ready.

But you know, my former life as a bibliophile, it possibly kept me from murdering somebody, myself included. it kept me from being an industrialist. it allowed me to endure some women that most men would never be able to live with. it gave me space, a pause. it helped me to write this.

and I sit there alone with you and Dostoevsky as the real and the artificial heart continues to falter, famished… I love you but don't know what to do.