Quotes About Literature

É a primeira vez depois de muitos meses que eu pego um livro nas mãos. Isto me diz muito e me cura consideravelmente.

You have been lucky to meet Guy de Maupassant. I have just read his first book, Des Vers, poems dedicated to his master Flaubert; there is one, "Au bord de l'eau," which is already himself. What Van der Meer of Delft is to Rembrandt among the painters, he is to Zola among the French novelists.

I am in the middle of reading Balzac, César Birotteau. I will send it to you when I have finished it - I think I shall read the whole of Balzac again.

But then I know that I am not - not their equal - but didn't the Flauberts and Balzacs make the Zolas and Maupassants? So here's to - not us, but to the generation to come.

It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.

Somewhere there must be women reading books, and talking of chicken rissoles to their cooks … (from,'Somewhere in England')

I call myself a wordkeeper, or a keeper of words. I enjoy words and looking at them on all sides… Words are magnificent… They form rhythms of living in meaningful prose… It is the force of my desire, my wish to make myself understood, that powers these words.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

It is the masculine values that prevail… This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

Trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats—and one always secretes too much jelly.

That complete statement which is literature.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Prison, illness, abuse, drugs, abandonment, deportation: all traumas have their literature. But this crucial and fundamental trauma -- the very definition of femininity, "the body that can be taken by force and must remain defenseless" -- was not part of literature. Not a single woman who has been through the process of rape has taken to words to craft a novel out of her experience. No guide, no companionship. Rape wasn't allowed into the symbolic realm.

Suddenly, literature, politics, and analysis came together, and I began to think more inclusively about the emotional imprisonment of mind and spirit to which all human beings are heir. In the course of analytic time, it became apparent that -- with or without the burden of social justice -- the effort required to attain any semblance of inner freedom was extraordinary. Great literature, I then realized, is a record not of the achievement, but of the effort.

In the late 1950s Leslie Fiedler observed that the Jewish-American novelist had internalized the stereotype of the Jew in American literature. When he sat down to write, he had trouble shaking off the hostile or sentimental images that appeared regularly in the work of gentile writers. It is impossible to overestimate the value of such an insight.

This book is for Randall Jarrell, the man who believed we are devoted to the act of making literature because it leads to the act of reading.

Come quasi tutti i lettori, a volte ho la sensazione di essere nata leggendo".

Those Grimm brothers," she said with a sigh, "they'll never amount to anything." And she was right because all they ever became was writers.

More people should read books. It's the most concentrated experience you can have.

Postmodernizam obra?a pažnju na modernizam. U osnovi su modernizmi binarne reakcije, a postmodernizam polinarna reakcija.

Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.