Quotes About Literature

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.

They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

There are some books that LIVE, she mused. They are young with us, and they grow old with us.

Talvolta penso che il paradiso sia leggere continuamente, senza fine.

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

A woman's writing is always feminine; it cannot help being feminine; at its best it is most feminine; the only difficulty lies in defining what we mean by feminine.

O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!

She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one.

Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.

All the time she writing the world had continued.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

I do think all good and evil comes from words. I have to tune myself into a good temper with something musical, and I run to a book as a child to its mother.

Literature had taken possession even of her memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain characters in the old novels...

No decent man ought to read Shakespeare's sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes.

And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. (...) almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. (...) [women in fiction were] not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that

I love tremendous and sonorous words.

Let us turn over the pages, and I will add, for your amusement, a comment in the margin.

and to forget one's own sharp absurd little personality, reputation and the rest of it, one should read; see outsiders; think more; write more logically; above all be full of work; and practise anonymity. Silence in company; or the quietest statement, not the showiest; is also medicated as the doctors say. It was an empty party, rather, last night. Very nice here, though.

the cardinal labor of composition, which is excision…

I had tea. I then spent a long time in a bookshop. A quiet evening.

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.

Orlando was unaccountably disappointed. She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses.