Quotes About Literature

Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet.

and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction

After all, we are not responsible. We are not judges. We are not called upon to torture our fellows with thumb-screws and irons; we are not called upon to mount pulpits and lecture them on pale Sunday afternoons. It is better to look at a rose, or to read Shakespeare as I read him here in Shaftesbury Avenue.

I had come at last, in the course of this rambling, to the shelves which hold books by the living; by women and by men; for there are almost as many books written by women now as by men. Or if that is not yet quite true, if the male is still the voluble sex, it is certainly true that women no longer write novels solely. There are Jane Harrison's books on Greek archaeology; Vernon Lee's books on aesthetics; Gertrude Bell's books on Persia.

Shakespeare could not have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural saveragery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string

There is little blood in my arm, Isabella repeated.

Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.

Avete idea di quanti libri si scrivono sulle donne in un anno? Avete idea di quanti sono scritti da uomini? Sapete di essere l'animale forse più discusso dell'universo?

Jane Austen) is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.

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. The

Do you have 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?

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing- room.

It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the dark paths of the mind and enter the past, to visit books, to brush aside their branches and break off some fruit.

It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, 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; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose.

If I have to wait, I read; if I wake in the night, I feel along the shelf for a book. Swelling, perpetually augmented, there is a vast accumulation of unrecorded matter in my head.

Think of me, the uneducated child reading books in my room at 22 Hyde Park Gate -- now advanced to this glory... Yes; all that reading, I say, has borne this odd fruit. And I am pleased.

One must have been something of a firebrand to say to oneself, Oh, but they can't buy literature too. Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel.

Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great writer knows that the word incarnadine belongs to multitudinous seas.

Have you any notion of 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?

her generation of novelists, including Forster, Lawrence, and Joyce, from their Edwardian predecessors, Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells.

What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! (...) I think I could happily live here & read forever.