top of page
"I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Literature quotes

"A book is as private and consensual as sex."

"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."

"When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time."

"I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these."- Mr. Darcy."

"I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt."

"There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dA©nouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display."

"I have been used to consider poetry as "the food of love" said Darcy."Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what isstrong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, Iam convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away."

"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."

"All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril."
Explore more quotes by E. B. White

"When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad."

"Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself - a lad of about 19."

"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it."

"I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat."

"The world organization debates disarmament in one room and, in the next room, moves the knights and pawns that make national arms imperative."

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
bottom of page