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"In French literature, you can choose a la carte; in Spanish literature, there is only the set meal."
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"Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire."

"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."

"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."

"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."

"And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book."

"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."

"I have been reading three books Dean lent me this week. One was like a rose garden--very pleasant, but just a little too sweet. And one was like a pine wood on a mountain--full of balsam and tang--I loved it, and yet it filled me with a sort of despair. It was written so beautifully--I can never write like that, I feel sure. And one--it was just like a pig-sty. Dean gave me that one by mistake."

"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."

"Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind."

"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
Explore more quotes by Jose Bergamin

"It may be impossible to have a revolution without crimes but that does not make revolution a crime."

"We say of an animal that it is intelligent, and we say the same thing of a woman; but in neither case is it usually appropriate, clearly for very different reasons."

"The man who gets drunk in peacetime is a coward. The man who gets drunk in wartime goes on being a coward."

"There are those who dance to the rhythm that is played to them, those who only dance to their own rhythm, and those who don't dance at all."

"In French literature, you can choose a la carte; in Spanish literature, there is only the set meal."
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