Quotes About Literature

I don't know where Henry was. Probably looking at the moon and reciting some poem from the T'ang Dynasty.

Bunny put away his copy of The Bride of Fu Manchu and started carrying around a volume of Homer instead.

Elle ne s'intéressait pas aux livres dans lesquels les enfants grandissaient, car (dans la vie comme en littérature) ce processus entrainait un affaiblissement accéléré et inexplicable du caractère ; de façon totalement inattendue, les héros et les héroïnes renonçaient à leurs aventures pour un amour insipide, se mariaient et fondaient une famille, et, en général, se comportaient comme un troupeau de vaches.

Well, I don't know who wrote this, said Francis at last, his tone offhand and perfectly casual, but whoever they were, they certainly couldn't spell.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death hath no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

author of more than

Why didn't vandals ever quote Shakespeare? I'd love to see graffiti in iambic pentameter.

Those who lead a literary life seem old when they're young and young when they're old, but they're never actually either. Like a good book, they are bound by neither category nor time.

our literature has fallen upon evil days...Read the latest book. What do you find? Simple anecdotes: murder, suicide and accident stories copied right out of the newspaper, tiresome sketches and wormy tales, all written in a colourless style and containing not the faintest outlook on life nor an appreciation of the human nature.

M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the millions of words that have ever existed, anywhere, in any age. In contrast with the spoken word and its classifying function, the purpose of writing seems, rather, to be a quest for the egg, the seed, nothing more.

A book is the only real escape from this fallen world.

It's that simple. A book is the only real escape from this fallen world. Aside from death.

Lies Bücher. So einfach ist das. Ein Buch ist die einzige wirkliche Flucht aus dieser gefallenen Welt. Außer dem Tod.

The mythic voice rising from literature and art allows us to be humane. We are not humane because of political power, or education, or even religion. We are humane because we recognize the humanity of others. The writer and the artist appeal to that humanity. For that reason, literature and art are the bones of civilization.

I like to read I"m ten and a half.

It's like when you read a book and you know that the words are important, but the images blossoming in your imagination are even more important because it's your mind that allows the words to come to life.

compared Voldemort to a character from Chitty

Shakespeare invented the Knock Knock joke, with the first one appearing in his play Macbeth. Here it is (and prepare yourself, it's a cracker)... 'Knock, knock, knock! Who's there, i' th' name of Beelzebub? Here's a farmer that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty. Come in time, have napkins enough about you, here you'll sweat for 't.

Can a literary character be said to live a life from birth to death or otherwise to undergo a development from beginning to end? Or is a literary character-fixed on the pages of a book, trapped forever in the same few words and actions-the very opposite of a living, developing human being?

I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.

Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

The English department of the spirit—that great quagmire that lurks at the bottom of all of us.

The literary fairy tale became an acceptable social symbolic form through which conventionalized motifs, characters, and plots were selected, composed, arranged, and rearranged to comment on the civilizing process and to keep alive the possibility of miraculous change and a sense of wonderment.