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Literature Quotes
"I often buy print books only after I've read them in some digital form or other. It's my odd way of keeping the physical presence of the best among multitudes. And I only have one shelf."
28
"Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood."
28
"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."
28
"It seemed to me that the entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising out memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room."
28
"When the whole world reads your books, is there any other happiness for a writer? I am happy that my books are read in 57 languages. But I am focused on Istanbul not because of Istanbul but because of humanity. Everyone is the same in the end."
28
"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
28
"Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature."
28
"I have good reason to be content,for thank God I can read andperhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths."
27
"The synopsis looked good, the cover looked nice, you opened the book and began a new life. You found a new home, you met some new friends, you kept on reading, hoping it ould never end. You danced through the pages, you sang out the words you felt all their joy, and all their pain and hurt. The pages cut your fingers, and the words cut your heart, like the author had a knife, and was tearing your soul apart. You laughed with the characters, and with them, you cried, you fell in love with them, too but with them, you died, and when the book reached its end, and your broken heart couldn't heal, you suddenly realized that its not real."
27
"The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish."
27
"I suppose all fictional characters, especially in adventure or heroic fiction, at the end of the day are our dreams about ourselves. And sometimes they can be really revealing."
27
"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."
27
"For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die."
27
"In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality."
26
"Reading a good book helps us to feel un-alone."
26
"We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie."
26
"Here's lumbos. Where misties swaddlum, where misches lodge none, where mystries pour kind on, O sleepy! So be yet!"
26
"Love in a hut with water and a crust Is - Love forgive us! - cinders ashes dust."
26
"I believe that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book does not rouse us with a blow then why read it?"
26
"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."
26
"Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow."
26
"The best fiction is far more true than any journalism."
26
"Macaulay is well for awhile but one wouldn't live under Niagara."
26
"Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire."
26
"And what so tedious as a twice-told tale."
26
"Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they area dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books."
25
"For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them."
25
"Simply put, dramatic irony is when a person makes a harmless remark, and someone else who hears it knows something that makes the remark have a different, and usually unpleasant, meaning. For instance, if you were in a restaurant and said out loud, "I can't wait to eat the veal marsala I ordered," and there were people around who knew that the veal marsala was poisoned and that you would die as soon as you took a bite, your situation would be one of dramatic irony."
25
"Every book is a great action and every great action is a book!"
25
"Books are almost as individual as friends. There is no earthly use in laying down general laws about them. Some meet the needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover's besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe calls 'the mad pride of intellectuality,' taking the shape of arrogant pity for the man who does not like the same kind of books."
25
"Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature."
25
"If you ask 20 different readers why they read, they will all be right."
25
"Wherever modern translations of marked excellence were already in existence efforts were made to secure them for the Library, but in a number of instances copyright could not be obtained."
25
"The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose."
25
"There are literary works that speak for themselves and there are writers who boast through work."
24
"I never did anything in life to anyone's imagination."
24
"If you would be a reader read if a writer write."
24
"And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways not tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs; adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not have grammatically existed before - such as 'breathing one's last' and 'backing a horse', both coined by Shakespeare - were suddenly popping up everywhere."
24
"Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism."
24
"The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you will believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences."
24
"Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless."
24
"She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened."
23
"Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony."
23
"Lord Peter's library was one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London. Its scheme was black and primrose; its walls were lined with rare editions, and its chairs and Chesterfield sofa suggested the embraces of the houris. In one corner stood a black baby grand, a wood fire leaped on a wide old-fashioned hearth, and the SA vres vases on the chimneypiece were filled with ruddy and gold chrysanthemums. To the eyes of the young man who was ushered in from the raw November fog it seemed not only rare and unattainable, but friendly and familiar, like a colourful and gilded paradise in a mediAval painting."
23
"He blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it and spare it as it went down to its resting place amidst the distant hills."
23
"The greatest story ever told is, in fact, the greatest story ever sold."
23
"There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations."
23
"Except for two or three older writers, all modern literature seems to me not literature but some sort of handicraft, which exists only so as to be encouraged, though one is reluctant to use its products."
23
"The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future."
23
"My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."
23
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