Quotes About Literature

To quote copiously and well, requires taste, judgment, and erudition, a feeling for the beautiful, an appreciation of the noble, and a sense of the profound.

The truth is, when I'm immersed in a book I'm less aware of the pain in my unpredictable arms and legs.

Now and then I leaf through the small blue volume of Emily Dickinson poems that my teacher, Mrs. Crowley, pressed into my hand. I remember her words to me when I left school: Your mind will be your comfort. It is, sometimes. And sometimes it isn't.

Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley. Our teacher made us memorize the words to "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and alone in the kitchen now I close my eyes and whisper Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time . . . but that's all I can remember.

I find it most offensive that the character of Reason, whom [ Jean den Meun (author of the Romance of the Rose )] himself calls the daughter of God, should put forth such a statement as ... where she says by way of a proverb that "in the war of Love it is better to deceive than be deceived." And indeed I dare say that in making that statement Jean den Meun 's Reason denied her Father, for the doctrine He gave was altogether different.

These are my habits and the way I spend my life: studying literature.

Just as women's bodies are softer than men's, so their understanding is sharper." ? Christine de Pizan She was the first woman in France to earn a living by her writing! Born 1364, she advocated for women's equality, wrote poetry, novels, biography, an autobiography, literary, political and religious commentary. She was the widowed mother of three and, perhaps, the first feminist!

Si las mujeres hubiesen escrito los libros, estoy segura de que lo habrían hecho de otra forma, porque ellas saben que se las acusa en falso.]

It's amazing that a man who is dead can talk to people through these pages. As long as this books survives, his ideas live.

Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in 'In Memory of WB Yeats': "You were silly like us.

Political activists rarely like fiction of any kind. Literature is about ambiguity, mixed emotions, and guilty pleasures. Politics is about ideals and action.

The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.

Dutton, the home of Winnie the Pooh, would find a second identity as a home for gay fiction.

Allen Ginsberg startled the audience at OutWrite, the gay literary conference, when he confessed he didn't worry about AIDS since his sex life consisted chiefly of giving blowjobs to straight college boys.

An obsessed reader figured that 'Armistead Maupin' was an anagram for 'is a man I dreamt up'.

A twenty-minute eulogy, unless composed by a) William Shakespeare, b) Winston Churchill, or c) Mark Twain, is sixteen minutes too long. Technical note: It is better to tell a eulogist to speak for four minutes not five minutes. "Five minutes" to the modern ear sounds like "around five minutes," whereas "four minutes" means "four minutes.

If Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel could have existed in reality, it would have been something like the Long Room of Trinity College.

Having failed the Civil Service entrance examinations, he had become – she recalled – a clerk at the London office of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank on 31 Lombard Street, at the age of eighteen – one of his 'fellow employees' there had been the young P. G. Wodehouse

imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one's life in a coal mine.

But what happens if and when writers begin to outnumber readers? What happens when writing becomes more attractive than reading? Will we become -- or are we already -- a nation of performers with no audience?

Furthermore, in a new study reported in the journal Science, subjects who read Alice Munro stories—specifically, the collection Too Much Happiness—demonstrated sharper social and psychological insight than those who did not.

Den hatte der Major jetzt freilich ganz vergessen, er berief sich nicht auf ihn, er nannte nicht innerlich seinen Namen, er zitierte den René nicht, wie wir den Anton Kuh in einer Fußnote. Würden alle Urheber-Rechts-Verletzungen im Leben ebenso verfolgt wie in der Literatur, der Welt gesamtes Gerichtswesen reichte nicht aus, um die Prozesse abzuwickeln, die ständig reziproken Anleihe-Verhältnisse auf dem Markt unserer Vorstellungen zu klären.

Táblákat kellene állítani a kortárs regények elé: ideköltözni tilos, letelepedni tilos, itt berendezkedni tilos. Aki szilárd talajt akar a lába alá, annak sokkal több kell, mint amit az irodalom és m?vészet valaha is nyújthat.

When I am asked how or why I wrote this or that, I always find myself quite embarrassed. I would gladly furnish not merely the questioner, but myself as well, with an exhaustive answer, but can never do so. I cannot recreate the context in its entirety, yet I wish that I could, so that at least the literature I myself make might be made slightly less of a mysterious process than bridge-building and bread-baking.