Quotes About Literature

Humiliation was his currency, but tonight Miss Laura had picked his pocket.

For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways.

Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.

Murderers were not writing literature, after all; they were murdering.

When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.

often she had seemed to herself to be moving among those vanished figures of old books and pictures, an invisible ghost among the living, better acquainted with them than with her own friends. she very nearly lost consciousness that she was a separate being, with a future of her own.

At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.

I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.

To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.

Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.

Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

Literature is no one's private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.

She read everything.

Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.

Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.