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Literature Quotes
"People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence."
15
"All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words."
15
"There are people.There are stories.The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse if often closer to the truth.Stories shape the world. They exist independently of people, and in places quite devoid of man, there may yet be mythologies."
15
"... novels contained something inexpressibly delicious."
15
"Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible."
15
"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."
15
"The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny."
15
"Anything from Kipling."
15
"Good novel are written by people who are not frightened."
15
"Shakespeare is getting flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him, as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the reach of scribbling fingers. With all this buzz of criticism about, one may hazard one's conjectures privately, make one's notes in the margin; but, knowing that someone has said it before, or said it better, the zest is gone. Illness, it its kingly sublimity, sweeps all that aside and leaves nothing but Shakespeare and oneself."
15
"A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images."
15
"The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."
15
"There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them."
15
"If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them " peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition."
15
"How one treats another one, determines success."
15
"Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you."
15
"A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders."
15
"The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study."
15
"..holding a book but reading the empty spaces."
15
"A book can't be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant."
15
"This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to 'serious' courses replete with 'trends ' and 'schools ' and 'myths ' and 'symbols ' and 'social comment ' and something unspeakably spooky called 'climate of thought.' Actually these 'serious' courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books."
15
"The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible."
15
"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."
15
"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."
15
"I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt."
15
"Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth."
15
"Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up."
15
"Books-they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions."
15
"Human beings have their great chance in the novel."
15
"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."
15
"Come, let's be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer."
15
"It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free."
15
"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."
15
"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."
15
"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."
14
"Footnotes the little dogs yapping at the heels of the text."
14
"For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years."
14
"A book did not qualify as literature unless it had polysyllabic words and incomprehensible passages."
14
"Words are like Leaves; and where they most abound,Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found."
14
"Myth could be as sustaining as reality - sometimes even more so."
14
"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 ..."
14
"Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much? Have you practis'd so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,) You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self."
14
"If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words."
14
"There are books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative."
14
"Do you know why I believe in the novel? It's a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street. I believe this, George. Some nameless drudge, some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit down and find his voice and luck out and do it. Something so angelic it makes your jaw hang open. The spray of talent, the spray of ideas. One thing unlike another, one voice unlike the next. Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints. And this is what you want to destroy."
14
"I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world."
14
"This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers."
14
"There is much you can learn from books and scrolls. These books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life."
14
"All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril."
14
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