Quotes About Literature

I don't know myself, what to do, where to go... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort... it's what the world offers... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

As long as we have books, we are not alone.

To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods.

The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives.

Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.

a book, a real book, language incarnate, becomes a part of one's bodily life.

Books were a dependable pleasure.

I'd had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn't apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all.

My mother used to read to me every night when I was little. We got through most of the major fantasy books of that time. The Narnia books by C.S. Lewis were my favorites and, later, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I started making dolls to fill in the gaps of the dolls I had. Obviously we couldn't buy centaurs and fauns and elves and fairies, so I made them to play with the normal dolls I had. I must have been about six years old when I started making fantasy dolls.

I suppose if I had to give a one-word answer to the question of why I read, that word would be pleasure. The kind of pleasure you can get from reading is like no other in the world.

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.

As Plato said, all poets are liars. This does not mean we should mistrust them.

T. S. Eliot, who remarked in one of his essays that immature poets imitate, mature poets steal).

Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times.

The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination.

Read The Story of O. Convince yourself that it was in fact written by a woman or someone who thinks like a woman.

distribución de ejemplares de este libro

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

Lord! haven't I seen you with the greatest authors in your hands, and don't I know how ready your attention is to wander when it's a book that asks for it, instead of a person?

I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading, and left my chambers to meet the cool night air in the suburbs.

Classical works; all (of course) immeasurably superior to anything produced in later times; and all (from my present point of view) possessing the one great merit of enchaining nobody's interest, and exciting nobody's brain.

Qué nadie se ría de la única anécdota que he narrado aquí. En buena hora podrán ustedes reírse de cuanta cosa haya escrito yo en estas páginas. Pero no cuando se trata de Robinson Crusoe. ¡Por dios! Porque es este un asunto serio para mí..., y les ruego que lo tomen ustedes de la misma manera, por lo tanto.

the window, turned back again into the room