Quotes About Literature

That's because humans are imperfect, so they make errors, which is why every book you've ever read has typos in it.

Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape.

Wordsworth phrase I'd learned in English class as a high school junior: emotion recollected in tranquillity.

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living. Cyril Connolly (English critic and editor, 1903-1974)

The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.

We are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realize any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience very time. It is far, far better to read one book six times, at intervals, than to read six several books.

The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville.

The real joy of a book lies in reading it over and over again, and always finding it different, coming upon another meaning, another level of meaning.

The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

i really like reading books

Bitter criticism caused the sensitive Thomas Hardy, one of the finest novelists ever to enrich English literature, to give up forever the writing of fiction. Criticism drove Thomas Chatterton, the English poet, to suicide.

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas , where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of the evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius ... and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.

sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.

that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways.

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.

Though he would sometimes not touch a book for a week, he generally spent part of each day in reading…if he sat in the library an hour, he would have half a dozen volumes around him, on the table, on chairs and on the floor. He seemed to read a few pages here and a few pages there, and pass from place to place, from volume to volume…sometimes (though very rarely) he would get sufficiently interested in a volume to read it all.

Conceiv'd out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism -personifying ill unparalleled ways the medieval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance (no mere imitation) -only one of the wolfish earls so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works -works in some respects greater than anything else ill recorded literature.

Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry