Quotes About Literature

It's not a book club if there isn't wine.

Like with wine?" Poppy was intrigued. "It's not a book club if there isn't wine.

She was in a book club?" said Poppy. "Everyone's in a book club." "Like with wine?" Poppy was intrigued. "It's not a book club if there isn't wine.

Part of dedicating your life to studying literature is realizing that storytelling is more than just make-believe and that make-believe is far more important that we all pretend -- make believe -- it is. One way or another books tell the stories of their readers. But telling our lives is not the same as shaping them, whittling them away. Suddenly Jill had lost control. Her books had taken over and were in charge.

firm believer in knowing people by knowing what they read, holding their favorite words in your mouth, running curious fingers along the spines of their books.

Poems are surmountable. They have rhymes and rhythms to help you make meaning. They're short enough. . . to read and reread until you've made some sense of them. Short stories are a different ballgame. You read them and understand the words completely. You know what happens in each sentence. You follow the dialogue and action. at the end, you know exactly what's happened. And also you have no idea.

people often are, even smart people who read—but it is okay because librarians have witchlike librarian magic to pick the right book for you.

I picked up one of the books and flipped through it. Don't get me wrong, I like reading. But some books should come with warning labels: Caution: contains characters and plots guaranteed to induce sleepiness. Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery after ingesting more than one chapter. Has been known to cause blindness, seizures and a terminal loathing of literature. Should only be taken under the supervision of a highly trained English teacher. Preferably one who grades on the curve.

I crawled into my book and pulled the pages over my head...

GUY: You're a writer? ME: Yeah. GUY: Any of your books made into a movie? ME: Sigh.

I cannot imagine a world in which one can read Jane Austen only once.

I would self-medicate with fat, carbohydrates, and Jane Austen, my number one drug of choice, my constant companion through every breakup, every disappointment, every crisis. Men might come and go, but Jane Austen was always there in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, till death do us part.

But I do know that any place where there are six novels by the author of Pride and Prejudice must be a very special sort of heaven.

None of my friends knows that most of the sick days I've taken from work are not sick days, but Austen days.

Men might come and go, but Jane Austen was always there. In sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, till death do us part.

Men might come and go, but Jane Austen was always there.

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

Books, books, books in all their aspects, in form and spirit, their physical selves and what reading releases from their hieroglyphic pages, in their sight and smell, in their touch and feel to the questing hand, and in the intellectual music which they sing to the thoughtful brain and loving heart, books are to me the best of all symbols, the realest of all reality.

I have always been reconciled to the fact that I was born a bibliomaniac, never have I sought a cure, and my dearest friends have been drawn from those likewise suffering from book madness.

My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.