Quotes About Literature

You call us book lovers, and it's true. We are. And so are you, at heart. You believe in the power of them to change the world.

Now, whom are we here to conspire against?' 'Poetry,' I said. 'Namely, Romeo's poetry.' 'Is it that bad?

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of the past centuries.

The Great Library may have once been a boon, but what is it today? What does it give us? It suppresses! It stifles! You, sir, do you own a book? No, sir, not a blank, filled only with what they want you to read...a real book, an original work, in the hand of the writer? The library owns our memories, yet you cannot own your own books! Why? Why do they fear it? Why do they fear to allow you the choice?

Books cannot fight for themselves.

Do you want to guess what's in here? I asked Dash. I think I've got it figured out already. There's a new supply of red notebooks in there, and you want us to fill them in with clues about the works of, say, Nicholas Sparks. Who? I asked. Please, no more broody poets. I couldn't keep up. You don't know who Nicholas Sparks is? Dash asked. I shook my head. Please don't ever find out, he said.

I particularly loved the adjective bookish, which I found other people used about as often as ramrod or chum or teetotaler.

Books. I'd probably spend all my time alone and lost in books if I could. It's easier that way.

And escape?" "Escape, sure. But it wasn't so much about getting away, as going to. You can go anywhere in a book. Books

I half expected to find Sherlock Holmes thumb wrestling with Jane Austen in the corner.

The drapery was so thick and the furniture so cloaked that I half expected to find Sherlock Holmes thumb-wrestling with Jane Austen in the corner. It wasn't as dusty or smoky as one expects a parlor to be, but all the wood had the weight of card catalogs and the fabric seemed soaked in wine. Knee-high sculptures perched in corners and by the fireplace, while jacketless books crowded on shelves, peering down like old professors too tired to speak to one another.

You think fairy tales are only for girls? Here's a hint—ask yourself who wrote them.

Librarians were like Mary Poppins to me. They always knew how to match a book to my mood, or to whatever I was going through at the time. I could always find peace in books.

I ram my phone back in my pocket and reread the same page in Hamlet for the thirteenth time. I still don't see how this is supposed to be English. I have no clue what these people are saying.

Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy

Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving and immortal part of it.

Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.

she ran for the only medicine that reliably cured any bout of unpleasant feelings: a book.

The clump-and-thud of avalanching books suggested that someone must be using the weapon of knowledge in an unconventional fashion.

I read to keep from being sad.

Is this not pathetic, Odd, what some ill-educated fool has done? I take solace in reminding myself that 'art is long and critics are the insects of a day.'" "Shakespeare?" I asked. "No. Randall Jarrell. A wonderful poet, now all but forgotten because modern universities teach nothing but self-esteem and toe-sucking.

With the thirst of an insatiable swillpot, he had poured down the fiction of two generations of deep thinkers, and he was pickled in their

The romantic fragrances of yellowing paper

Biedermeier