Quotes About Literature

I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have none for books, those spiritual repasts - a grace before Milton - a grace before Shakespeare - a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen?

I think they assign things to students which are way over their heads, which destroy your love of reading, rather than leading you to it. I don't understand that. Gosh.

A lot of dead writers feed my mind with their ever-present whisperings.

You unhinged your body from an opium addiction with a book?" She smiled. "Not just any book. A series of thirteen books by one author. I've read them twenty or thirty times each." "You've read one book twenty or thirty times?" "Actually, I've read thirteen books twenty-seven times.

A lot of dead writers feed my mind with their ever-present whisperings. I

But it was not until Samuel Richardson's Pamela in 1740 and, a decade later, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, that the novel reached the form as we know it today, and opened an outpouring of work in 19C that would transform literature throughout the West.

Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

I slept little, read a lot, and fell in love frequently.

In memory of Terry Pratchett, who showed us all how it's done

In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time -- none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads--and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.

In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a board subject matter area) who didn't read all the time - none, zero. You'd be amazed how much Warren reads - and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.

An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy.

Have you by any chance an edition of St. Ignatius's treatise against the Gnostics?" he asked in a low clear voice. The young assistant looked gravely back. "Not for sale, I'm afraid," he said. "Nor, if it comes to that, the Gnostic treatises against St. Ignatius." "Quite," Anthony answered.

The sneaky heftiness of the book being the aggregate cumulative effect of hundreds of thousands of individually insubstantial little markings, letters and numbers, commas and periods and colons and dashes, each symbol pressed upon the page by the printing machine with a slightly greater-than-expected force and darkness and permanence.

I was the hero, Roberto De Niro, William Shakespearo! Walking on the beaches, looking at the peaches.

All children in adventure books have to be orphans.

If you write a book and nobody reads it, does the book exist? Stories in books, characters and things, you know, like places and monsters or whatever the writer has made up and written down, they only really come alive when we read them. Otherwise it's just a jumble of squiggles on bits of paper.

Reader, I married him.

I am neither a man nor a woman but an author.

I know that there is not in the world a more subtle poison than that which is extracted from and administered by books.

Lady Bella went up to her apartment, and betook herself to her Books, which supplied the place of all company to her.

Children must have books, living books; the best are not too good for them; anything less than the best is not good enough; and if it is needed to exercise economy, let go everything that belongs to soft and luxurious living before letting go the duty of supplying the books, and the frequent changes of books, which are necessary for the constant stimulation of the child's intellectual life.

Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.