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Literature Quotes
"Books. It's always easier to tell people that a character is funny rather than attempt to hit the punchline of a joke that character would've said. But if we all simply told, books would cease to exist. And so would empathy. And feeling."
4
"I think that pretty much every form of fiction (I'd include fantasy, obviously) can actually be a real escape from places where you feel bad, and from bad places. It can be a safe place you go, like going on holiday, and it can be somewhere that, while you've escaped, actually teaches you things you need to know when you go back, that gives you knowledge and armour and tools to change the bad place you were in.So no, they're not escapist. They're escape."
4
"To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient."
4
"I realized that the story of even so small a place can never be completely told and can never be finished. It is eternal, always here and now, and going on forever."
4
"And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus-he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband."
4
"Every book is a great action and every great action is a book!"
4
"Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story."
4
"In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it."
4
"Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships..."
4
"A word (...) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (...) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer."
4
"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture."
4
"There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading."
4
"Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner."
4
"Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago."
4
"Tom Sawyer the Pirate looked around upon the envying juveniles about him and confessed in his heart that this was the proudest moment of his life."
4
"To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon."
4
"The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read the."
4
"Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board."
4
"Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it."
4
"Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too."
4
"Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true."
4
"Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over."
4
"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
4
"Think you if Laura had been Petrarch's wife He would have written sonnets all his life?"
4
"Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind."
4
"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."
3
"The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself."
3
"I guess there are never enough books."
3
"You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes."
3
"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."
3
"That happens a lot with Shakespeare. The women go after what they want the men wind up suckered into things."
3
"Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm."
3
"It is not all books that are as dull as their readers."
3
"Myth could be as sustaining as reality - sometimes even more so."
3
"In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them."
3
"C'est moi, c'est moi,'tis I,' I told him. It seemed appropriately melodramatic, though I didn't know if he'd catch the reference. I shouldn't have worried. Unexpectedly, he laughed. "Trust you to quote Lancelot rather than Guinevere."
3
"I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves."
3
"Tolkien did admit that, 'As a guide, I had only my own feelings for what is appealing or moving.' In other words ~ he wrote about what interested him ~ and despite his protestation of including anything allegorical into his tale, Catholic history and mystic prophecy obviously received its fair share of attention ..."
3
"You may ask, why not simply call this literature Christian? Unfortunately, the word Christian is no longer reliable. It has come to mean anyone with a golden heart. And a golden heart would be a positive interference in the writing of fiction."
3
"Poets, you always write about women worth dying for. Write, for a change, something about the ones worth living for!"
3
"What is written beneath this heavy handsome book cover will count, so sayeth this cover."
3
"That they will find each other during the play, once more, in the words of Shakespeare."
3
"I can't bear literary snobbery."
3
"Every novel says to the reader: "Things are not as simple as you think. That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it's either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless."
3
"If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble."
3
"I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was."
3
"About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong."
3
"To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention."
3
"It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the reader.Moral: there exist obsessive ideas, they are never personal; books talk among themselves, and any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party."
3
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