Quotes About Literature

I'll be supposed upon a book, his face is the worst thing about him.

I might call him. A thing divine, for nothing natural. I ever saw so noble.

William Shakespeare

His silver skin laced with his golden blood.

Fare thee well/ A fiend like thee might bear my soul to hell.

What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here...

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

Thou weedy elf-skinned canker-blossom!

The wine-cup is the little silver well, Where truth, if truth there be Doth dwell.

What do you read, my lord? Words, words, words.

It is surely significant, for instance, that Romeo and Juliet was written at around the same time as The Merchant of Venice, a play that is preoccupied with the whole question of freedom of choice and its consequences.4

As with all literature, the play should be read through the eyes of the author, as far as this is possible, which in Shakespeare's case means reading it through the eyes of an orthodox Christian living in Elizabethan England.

Out o' th' moon, I do assure thee. I was the man in the moon when time was, --Stephano (Act II, scene 2, lines 136-137)

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a happy bunch of chuckleheads.

Mercifully, I was at that age when reading was still a passion and thus, save for a happy marriage, the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay. I could not have made it through those evenings otherwise.

A lot of the literature available concerning depression is, as I say, breezily optimistic, spreading assurances that nearly all depressive states will be stabilized or reversed if only the suitable antidepressant can be found; the reader is of course easily swayed by promises of quick remedy...I am hardly able to believe that I possessed such ingenuous hope, or that I could have been so unaware of the trouble and peril that lay ahead.

Mercifully, I was at that age when reading was still a passion and thus, save for a happy marriage, the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be/Yet such wherein men may thy judgment see.

For she was clever. It had not been a lie then, that ecstasy which had visited her when she read A Midsummer Night's Dream on top of the railway coach last summer. It had meant something. She had understood something. She was drunk with an intoxicating wine of gladness.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them...let them be your friends.

Quando il piccolo uomo se ne fu andato, Ross si riempì nuovamente la pipa, l'accese e tornò al suo libro. Tabitha Bethia gli saltò in grembo e lui non la spinse via, e cominciò invece a massaggiarle un orecchio mentre leggeva.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.