Quotes About Literature

Es un buen libro y, por lo tanto, debería intentar vendérselo a los habitantes de Hardborough. No lo entenderán, pero será mejor así. Entender las cosas hace que la mente se vuelva perezosa.

Un buen libro es la preciosa savia del alma de un maestro, embalsamada y atesorada intencionadamente para una vida más allá de la vida y, como tal, no hay duda de que debe ser una artículo de primera necesidad

Hojear libros es parte de la tradición de una libreria -le dijo Florence-. Debes dejar que se queden y toquen los libros.

Ein gutes Buch ist der kostbare Lebenssaft eines meisterlichen Geistes, einbalsamiert und aufbewahrt zum Zweck eines Lebens über das Leben hinaus (...)

For me, reading is my essential palliative, my daily fix.

If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

Fiction can seem more enduring than reality. Pierre on the field of battle, the Bennet girls at their sewing, Tess on the threshing machine – all these are nailed down for ever, on the page and in a million heads. What happened to me on Charmouth beach in 1920, on the other hand, is thistledown.

Charlotte misses her books. Her familiar walls, lined with language.

Helen read a great deal. The feel of a book in her hands was an ancient solace -- not, originally, because of what lay between the covers but as a screen, a defence, a shield.

So we may use our books to form a barricade against the world, interweaving their words with our own to ward off the heat of the day.

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirror on every page

the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirrored on every page

As a result of Malory's plangent and often elaborate prose, the song of Arthur has never ended. Le Morte d'Arthur inspired both Milton and Dryden with dreams of Arthurian epic, and in the nineteenth century Tennyson revived the themes of Malory in Idylls of the King. William Morris wrote The Defence of Guenevere , and Algernon Swinburne composed Tristram of Liones. The Round Table was reconstituted in the libraries of nineteenth-century England.

it has been observed that Londoners became more extravagant in the presence of Charles Dickens, so that they might appear more Dickensian, so

a melodious melancholy manner of mirth.

Peter Ackroyd

House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored

Percy Buckle looked around his little room and knew he never had to weigh a pound of flour again in his life. I can read all day. Even as a grocer he had been a bookish fellow. All his life it had been the same -- even when he was too tired to manage more than half a page of Ivanhoe in a night, even when he smelt inescapably of sprats and mackerel, he had been a member of a lending library, and a regular attendant at the Workingman's Institute.

What is that thing? Vampires. Or, as it was spelled at the time, vampyres. Yes, we know: It is difficult to accept, a strain to wrap your head around. Go and take the time to do so. Watch some television programs, or read some books in which vampyres are heroic and charming and sparkle in the daylight, and then return here and brace yourself for a return to a time that vampyres were things that went bump in the night.

Many of those who refer to Orwell seem not to have read much more than Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four , if those. The millions who have heard of Big Brother and Room 101 know nothing of their progenitor.

Is not literature meant to speak of our being a thousand different kinds of things, at times creating even this diversity? If literature gives up this purpose, this duty, it renounces all claim to legitimacy. I am Hungarian. I I am Slovene. I am Serbian. You do not need literature for sentences like that. A bureaucrat will do, and a rubber stamp. A border guard. An Army.

Zeichen eines großen Schriftstellers (Doderer): man nimmt von ihm auch praktische Ratschläge für den Alltag an

The trouble with great literature is that any asshole can identify with it.