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Literature Quotes
"Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about."
2
"Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don't want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons."
2
"Pages entertain me more than pictures do."
2
"A book,a book fullof human touches,of shirts,a bookwithout loneliness, with menand tools,a bookis victory."
2
"A rag and a bone and a hank of hair."
2
"I agree with Kilgore Trout about realistic novels and their accumulations of nit-picking details. In Trout's novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back. The librarian asks him why he doesn't like it, and he says to her, "I already know about human beings."
2
"Today, fantasy is, for better or for worse, just another genre, a place in a bookshop to find books that, too often, remind one of far too many other books; it is an irony, and not entirely a pleasant one, that what should be, by definition, the most imaginative of all types of literature has become so staid, and, too often, downright unimaginative."
2
"Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer's 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
2
"Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose."
2
"What was he? Storyteller and secretary and doer of odd jobs, neither Tizerkane nor delegate, just someone along for the dream."
2
"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."
2
"I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles."
2
"This place looks like the last scene in Hamlet."
2
"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."
2
"After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels."
2
"His line was the jocundly-sentimental Wardour Street brand of adventure, told in a style that exactly met, but never exceeded, every expectation."
2
"The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny."
2
"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."
2
"Good novel are written by people who are not frightened."
2
"Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism."
2
"If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination - that another power has found them and generously presented them to me."
2
"I wanted a library like this...[] A cave of words that I'd made myself."
2
"Her stories were made of badass women teasing monsters and running wild with dragons."
2
"Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity."
2
"A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images."
2
"Let the readers do some of the work themselves."
2
"If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago."
2
"No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous- Almost, at times, the Fool."
2
"Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow."
2
"The story of Eve and the serpent, and of Noah and his ark, drops to a level with the Arabian Tales, without the merit of being entertaining, and the account of men living to eight and nine hundred years becomes as fabulous as the immortality of the giants of the Mythology."
2
"No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don't you think? The young are eternally desperate, he said frankly. "And books, they offer hope - that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe one is saved."
2
"I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific."
2
"One likes to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange, impossible place where the beaux of Fielding may still make love to the belles of Richardson, where Scott's heroes still may strut, Dickens's delightful Cockneys still raise a laugh, and Thackeray's worldlings continue to carry on their reprehensible careers. Perhaps in some humble corner of such a Valhalla, Sherlock and his Watson may for a time find a place, while some more astute sleuth with some even less astute comrade may fill the stage which they have vacated."
2
"I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed."
2
"How many writers still dare compare a woman to Nature, like Campion? - there is a garden in her face - how lovely..."
2
"Literature provides a person with a conceptual framework for recognizing human beings recurrent challenges in life. Reading good literature deepens a person's understanding of the variable ways that somebody might respond to circumstances in their world, thereby adding to their own potential intellectual and spiritual depth and expands their understanding of the nuances of their own personal behavior."
2
"I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne--I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them...But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne."
2
"I believe books should be like a prime rib steak ~ good and thick."
2
"It was pretty silly quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with all your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them."
2
"Let me tell you something. You won't mind, will you? Don't have scenes with your young ladies. Try not to. Because you can't have scenes without crying, and then you pity yourself so much you can't remember what the other person's said. You'll never be able to remember conversations that way. Just try and be calm. I know it's awfully hard. But remember, it's for literature. We all ought to make sacrifices for literature. Look at me. I'm going to England without a protest. All for literature."
2
"It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology."
2
“As a rule of thumb, I'd say one cliché per [Romance]--and then be damn sure you can make it work. But if you're going to try to write the virginal amnesiac twin disguised as a boy mistaken for the mother (or father depending how well the disguise works) of a secret baby, honey, you better have some serious skills. Or seek therapy.”
2
"Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading-I like reading books in the bulk."
2
"I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character " not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers."
2
"I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end."
2
"Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person."
2
"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
2
"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."
2
"This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it & the soul of those who read it & lived it & dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down it's pages, it's spirit grows & strengthens. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands, a new spirit..."
2
"The book did not say anything about a statue, valuable or otherwise, and so I stopped reading about the Bombinating Beast and got interested in the chapter about the Stain'd witches, who had ink instead of blood in their veins. I wondered what they kept in their pens."
2
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