Quotes About Literature

The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.

Literature starts by being personal, but the deeper we go inside the more we become everybody.

When I was sixteen I read ten books a week: E.E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Henry James, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck. I thought I progressed in literature by reading faster and faster--but reading more is reading less. I learned to slow down.

Well, you know, I love to read. Actually, I'm looking at a book, I'm reading a book, I'm trying to get started.

I like a lot of books. I like reading books. I don't have time to read very much now in terms of the books, but I like reading them.

How many novels have moved you to tears, rage, and a resolution to live differently?

I wasn't looking for a formula in the text, a few steps to make my life better; instead, I was reading it like literature, as though a human being were trying to tell me something about life, something he thought was beautiful or ugly, true or inspiring—you know the drill.

a half million books, all of them smelling like dust and ink, two terrible smells that blend mystically to make something beautiful.

Reading mysteries: the recreation of intelligent minds.

He hesitated then, anticipating the panic that came when there was nothing left to read. - Guido Brunetti

She became his Ariadne, leading him through the labyrinth of books, stopping now and then to pass another one to him.

I've been thinking that of late - she said. - Thinking what? - That the world of Henry James is becoming very small for me.

Henry James escribió Los papeles de Aspern

She reminds me a bit of those women in nineteenth-century novels, interested in the moral improvement of their inferiors,' she said.

There had been no noise from any other part of the apartment, but that didn't exclude the possibility of Paolo's presence, especially if she had given her soul over to reading. He sometimes told her that Attila could storm through the house and she'd not notice if she were reading. She had most recently disputed this by claiming that it would depend on the book. Her door was open, so he went in. And found her on the sofa, with Henry James.

Does such a thing as the fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.

You want to know what Classics are? said a drunk Dean of Admissions to me at a faculty party a couple of years ago. I'll tell you what Classics are. Wars and homos.

I mean, this man was not /Voltaire/ we killed.

In films, we are voyeurs, but in novels, we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person's soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And this is why sometimes, when we put down a book, we find ourselves slightly altered as human beings. Novels change us from within.

I met her my first year of college, and was initially attracted to her because she seemed an intelligent, brooding malcontent like myself; but after about a month, during which time she'd firmly glued herself to me, I began to realize, with some little horror, that she was nothing more than a lowbrow, pop-psychology version of Sylvia Plath.

hubris on Henry's, too much Greek prose composition—whatever

You're a Homeric scholar?' I might have said yes, but I had the feeling he'd be glad to catch me in a mistake and he would be able to do it easily. 'I like Homer' I said weakly. He regarded me chill distaste. 'I love Homer' He said.

Even if you don't like Poe—he invented the detective story. And science fiction. In essence, he invented a huge part of the twentieth century.