Quotes About Literature

She'd been an actress, an artist's model, once or twice a kept woman, through all a voracious reader.

The more you read, the harder it is to condemn.

Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.

Every time I fall in love with a book, I just feel grateful and thrilled to have it in my life.

I can't read Mason & Dixon , since my mind's so shitty, I can't process it!

Years earlier, I might have scoffed, but I'd come to accept that, for Snowden's generation, they played no less serious a role in molding political consciousness, moral reasoning, and an understanding of one's place in the world than literature, television, and film. They, too, often present complex moral dilemmas and provoke contemplation, especially for people beginning to question what they've been taught.

Interpreting literature was like performing a piece of music. It was a matter of lines and phrases, of hearing the resonance and learning where the stress falls. The note A has little significance by itself, just like the words love and yes. Yet placed just right, surrounded by other notes, other words, even a single tone can absorb all the forcefulness of our need, returning it to us as meaning.

Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.

We can, as Martha Nussbaum (2010) suggests, benefit from the enlarged and varied imagination that literature, films, and other cultural products afford us to start to occupy different positionings than we usually occupy.

If you love books, I will give you some to take with you, and one day I will introduce you to the writers of the books.

Publishers are all cohorts of the devil; there must be a special hell for them somewhere.

So vertraulich, so heimlich hab' ich nicht leicht ein Plätzchen gefunden, und dahin lass' ich mein Tischchen aus dem Wirtshause bringen und meinen Stuhl, trinke meinen Kaffee da und lesen meinen Homer.

I call the Classical what is healthy and the Romantic what is sick. - Goethe in 1829

Andre verschlafen ihren Rausch, Meiner steht auf dem Papiere.

There is something wonderful about a book. We can pick it up. We can heft it. We can read it. We can set it down. We can think of what we have read. It does something for us. We can share great minds, great actions, and great undertakings in the pages of a book.

It is both revealing and invigorating to occasionally set aside the worries of life, seek the company of a friendly book and mingle with the great of the earth, counsel with the wise of all time, look into the unlived days with prophets...To become acquainted with real nobility as it walks the pages of history and science and literature is to strengthen character and develop life in its finer meanings.

It is both relaxing and invigorating to ... set aside the worries of life, [and] seek the company of a friendly book...

Don't have stories; have sentences.

Nothing substitutes for what can be found when we embrace the world of books.

I'll tell you, but it's a whole book.

There is no thief worse than a bad book.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Books are embalmed minds.

I'm a bookaholic on the road to recovery. Ha, not really. I'm on the road to the bookstore.