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Literature Quotes
"Reading literature and engaging in writing breaks through the mental rigidity that experience and repetition breeds."
20
"I guess there are never enough books."
20
"Truth in her dress finds facts too tight. In fiction she moves with ease."
20
"So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam."
20
"The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things."
20
"Soon I'll find the right words, they'll be very simple."
20
"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."
20
"The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."
20
"If we think of the novel and the epic...The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero--a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character."
20
"Jesus--if Kilgore Trout could only write!" Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good."
20
"It's such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone."
20
"In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art."
20
"And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun."
20
"If a book is well written, I always find it too short."
20
"One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation."
20
"The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape."
20
"I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one."
20
"My life is a reading list."
20
"Books may well be the only true magic."
20
"It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned."
20
"Shakespeare 'never owned a book,' a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probably that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books."
20
"This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job."
20
"Fictional people are people, too, otherwise why would we care what happens to them?"
20
"And not only narrativity but the quality of the writing is of the first importance to me. Rightly or not, I believe a dull, inept style signals poverty or incompleteness of thought. I see the accuracy, scope, and quality of Darwin's intellect directly expressed in the clarity, strength, and vitality of his writing - the beauty of it."
20
"So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened."
20
"We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I was taught from this was not to begin a sentence with And. I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with And, but I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible at that time."
20
"The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby."
20
"I want the difficult stories, the ones that aren't easy to believe, the twisted ones, the sorrowful ones, the ones that need telling most of all."
20
"I had a serious library at my disposal, because my Popo believed that culture entered by osmosis and it was better to start early, but my favorite books were fairy tales."
20
"There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann."
20
"With a book, you're guaranteed the audience has a certain skill level and that the audience has to make an ongoing effort to consume this product and that the project is being consumed by just one person at a time. I really want to play to that strength because it's one of the few advantages books still have."
20
"A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing."
20
"The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."
19
"When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear."
19
"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."
19
"Brrr, who had never admired books particularly...didn't remember that a mere book might reek of sex, possibility, fecundity. Yet a book has a ripe furrow and a yielding spine, he thought, and the nuances to be teased from its pages are nearly infinite in their variety and coquettish appeal. And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe."
19
"True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded."
19
"Twas bryllig and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe All mimsy were the borogoves And the mome raths out grabe."
19
"Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards, their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble, the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."
19
"They say a story loses something with each telling."
19
"What is written beneath this heavy handsome book cover will count, so sayeth this cover."
19
"Her book has perhaps been a good one; it has refreshed, refilled, rewarmed her heart; it has set her brain astir, furnished her mind with pictures."
19
"I have never been able to make out," I began, "why women are so shy about being caught reading poetry.We men--lawyers, mechanics, or what not--may well feel ashamed. If we must read poetry, it should be at dead of night, within closed doors. But you women are so akin to poesy. The Creator Himself is a lyric poet, and Jayadeva must have practised the divine art seated at His feet."
19
"I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play, - Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away; Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street, Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet."
19
"Nobody can pretend to know what people want to read or hear or see. People rarely know it themselves, they only know it after the fact."
19
"It's not in the book or in the writer that readers discern the truth of what they read; they see it in themselves, if the light of truth has penetrated their minds."
19
"Over the years, more than one reviewer has described my fantasy series, 'A Song of Ice and Fire', as historical fiction about history that never happened, flavoured with a dash of sorcery and spiced with dragons. I take that as a compliment."
19
"There was going to be a spot for me in this joint, the earth, after all. It was never going to be a great match for someone as bright and strange as me, but books were going to make it survivable."
19
"All these uses a valid; all these reading of the book are "correct". For all these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world of Ender's Game, not with my eyes only, but also with their own."
19
"Individuals often turn to poetry, not only to glean strength and perspective from the words of others, but to give birth to their own poetic voices and to hold history accountable for the catastrophes rearranging their lives."
19
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