Quotes About Literature

On the wall of his living room Billy had painted the words 'Kill the Father.' Killing the father was what, in Billy's opinion, college was all about. Who's your father? he asked Madeleine. Is it Virginia Woolf? Is it Sontag? In my case, Madeleine said, my father really is my father. Then you have to kill him. Who's your father?

Sure. Martinis. We can pretend we're Salinger characters.

He explained that he had arrived at college without knowing much about religion, and how, from reading English literature, he'd begun to realize how ignorant he was. The world had been formed by beliefs he knew nothing about. 'That was the beginning,' he said, 'realizing how stupid I was.

tsundoku: the act of buying so many books that they begin to pile up in a delightful mess.

The question of what kind of a thing a text or poem is now becomes a function neither of what the poet might have intended by its words nor of what the conventions of grammar and meaning might seem to require of them, but rather of the reader's irreducibly subjective experience in her encounter with those words.

Life and Letters (New York: Knopf, 1972); and John E. Washington, They Knew Lincoln (New York: Dutton, 1942). Of course, no work was more important than Elizabeth Keckley's own memoir, Behind the Scenes (New York, G. W. Carleton & Company

learn, to make sense of the world around us. As long as we need stories, we will need books, and as long as there are books, there will be libraries.

I realized that a book can reach out and embrace you like an arm and make you walk away from everything you thought you understood.

Lee stood in front of the class the first day and said, "Anybody who makes fun of romance fiction is making fun of Jane Austen, and anybody who makes fun of Jane Austen answers to me." Why yes, I would walk across broken glass for that man. Why do you ask?

People should be more careful about what they read to their kids," Park said. "Some of this stuff sounds dangerous.

Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected women from the truth were burst by the Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot.… Jane Austen may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her." G.K. CHESTERTON

don't be snowed by a handsome guy at a bookstore who quotes Cicero and Proust. They are often not the real thing. As with many fleeting pleasures--travel in their company, enjoy them every so often, and then get on with your life.

Mas, para mim, a leitura é muito mais que isso. Os livros ensinam a você como outras pessoas pensam o que estão sentindo e como se transformam de seres comuns em seres extraordinários. Muitas vezes eles são tão atraentes e inteligentes que você prefere passar o tempo lendo sobre elas a fazer qualquer outra coisa.

mooo, she said... I mean mmmm, she moaned. Louder this time. Goddamn Dr. Seuss is ruining my sex life.

And what do you do all day?" her sister asked. Jo made herself smile. "I cook. I clean. I read. I write." "So you're basically Betty Crocker," Bethie said. "Betty Crocker with a library card.

I'm not sure whether that had to do with the humor, or with the unfashionable fairy-tale ending, which is very different from much of what I read in The New Yorker, where short stories seem to end with someone staring off at the white walls of a white room, and you think that something's happened but you're not quite sure what.

It would not be a good place for the heroine of a modern novel to stay at.  The heroine of a modern novel is always "divinely tall," and she is ever "drawing herself up to her full height."  At the "Barley Mow" she would bump her head against the ceiling each time she did this.

Eat good dinners and drink good wine; read good novels if you have the leisure and see good plays; fall in love, if there is no reason why you should not fall in love; but do not pore over influenza statistics.

The chief beauty of this book lies not so much in its literary style, or in the extent and usefulness of the information it conveys, as in its simple truthfulness. 

They took him to Wagner festivals and Burne-Jones's private views. They read him all the minor poets. They booked seats for him at all Ibsen's plays. They introduced him into all the most soulful circles of artistic society. His days were one long feast of other people's enjoyments.

who weighs about twelve stone. 

No, no. It's not your fault. 'Books, books, I need my books.' Have you re-read those books yet, by the way? - Jerry, Seinfeld

The kids who leave their favorite authors behind do not in fact leave us utterly abandoned, but in due time drive children of their own to the bookstore and the post office.

History sits on our shoulders, while reading opens our hearts.