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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."
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"A rag and a bone and a hank of hair."
14
"A book may be compared to your neighbour: if it be good it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early."
14
"Upon the publication of Goethe's epic drama, the Faustian legend had reached an almost unapproachable zenith. Although many failed to appreciate, or indeed, to understand this magnum opus in its entirety, from this point onward his drama was the rule by which all other Faust adaptations were measured. Goethe had eclipsed the earlier legends and became the undisputed authority on the subject of Faust in the eyes of the new Romantic generation. To deviate from his path would be nothing short of blasphemy."
14
"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."
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"His line was the jocundly-sentimental Wardour Street brand of adventure, told in a style that exactly met, but never exceeded, every expectation."
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"Her stories were made of badass women teasing monsters and running wild with dragons."
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"The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them."
14
"Rain's pouring and it's too cold. All people bored and I even accord What to do but spell a tale told: So once upon a time a land in the shore..."
14
"You see, one of the best things about reading is that you'll always have something to think about when you're not reading."
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"What's the use of stories that aren't even true?"
14
"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."
14
"Edna restored the toffee to the centre of her tongue and sucking pleasurably, resumed her typing of Naked Love by Armand Levine. Its painstaking eroticism left her uninterested--as indeed it did most of Mr. Levine's readers, in spite of his efforts. He was a notable example of the fact that nothing can be duller than dull pornography."
14
"The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole. For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole."
14
"I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once-and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters."
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"I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science."
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"Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart."
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"Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading-I like reading books in the bulk."
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"I do not steal imagination. I use it and replace it by making people read."
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"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
14
"And all who told it added something new And all who heard it made enlargements too."
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"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
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"Blake said Milton was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it. I am of the Devil's party and know it."
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"Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it."
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"Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems."
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"In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams."
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"To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you. It can help you not to be dead man in life."
14
"To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read."
14
"I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'"
14
"A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures."
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"My parents would frisk me before family events. Before weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and what have you. Because if they didn't, then the book would be hidden inside some pocket or other and as soon as whatever it was got under way I'd be found in a corner. That was who I was...that was what I did. I was the kid with the book."
14
"While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best."
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"If a book is worth reading it is worth buying."
14
"When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors Landor replies "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life.""
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"Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. - It is not fair. - He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. - I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it - but fear I must."
14
"When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book."
14
"She found as always that words on paper proved themselves, they were so beautifully true."
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"A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give."
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"For what was it about books that once finished left the reader in a bit of a haze and made them reread the last few sentences in order to continue the ringing in their hearts a while longer, so as not to let the silence illumine the fact that reading, they had gained something - distance, a lesson, a companion, a new world - but now, after the last full stop, they had lost something palpable and felt a little emptier than before."
14
"Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
14
"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."
13
"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."
13
"Literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed."
13
"I often like to enjoy the beauty of a beautiful book."
13
"Pronto me di cuenta de que estas enseñanzas podían ser un consuelo solo para los que las aceptaran literalmente y que creyeran ser la verdad. Si fueran, como para mí, en parte bella literatura, parte símbolos intrincados; un intento de explicación mitológica del mundo, uno podría instruirse y apreciarlas, pero uno no aprendería la forma de vivir y sacar fuerza de ellas."
13
"The fault I find in our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other everyday, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance."
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"We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading."
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"Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature."
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"That they will find each other during the play, once more, in the words of Shakespeare."
13
"This is Winter," said Scarlet. "Princess Winter."Thorne guffawed and pushed a hand into his hair. "Are we running a boardinghouse for misplaced royalty around here, or what?"
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