Quotes about literature

Reading is for pleasure it’s not another form of social competition. Leave those literary Joneses to it.

History must be documented every moment is a sacred history.

Nothing is inanimate what is the rest is our interpretation.

Forget it. Never explain never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't.

Faith is a question of eyesight even the blind can see that.

(on the portrayal of women in literature) Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

Summer afternoon—summer afternoon to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand pen mighter than the sword and so forth.

They grew they did not talk about growing.

We all live with the objective of being happy our lives are all different and yet the same.

Color is the overpowering of black white – the final victory over black.

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

Don Quixote is not just Don Quixote La Mancha is not just geography It is our personal territory—Terra Nostra.

Even things in a book-case change if they are alive we find ourselves wanting to meet them again we find them altered

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

A writing may be lost a lie may be written but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.

That’s the thing about living vicariously it’s so much faster than actual living.

The truth is that we all live by leaving behind no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.

I had try to tell the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know.

The American girl isn't ANY girl she's a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed but a thing created is loved before it exists.

What a tribute this is to art what a misfortune this is for history. (In reference to Shakespeare's 'Richard III')

The world of numbers and words is odd. A number is the only word that doesn’t lie and words can be very deceitful they create the illusion that a large number hides a great word.

What makes up a life events or the recollection of events?How much of recollection is invention?Whose invention?

People are so annoying. All my pianists look exactly like poets and all my poets look exactly like pianists.

…the great thing about literature is that you can imagine the great thing about film is that you can’t.

The writer is neither saint nor tzaddik nor prophet standing at the gate he's just another sinner who has a somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe the inconceivable reality of our world.

I do have a religion it’s just not an ordinary one. In fact it is an extraordinary one. My religion is Literature.

Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression they exist where a word has never intruded.

Words are just words a book never harmed anyone by itself.

...the pleasures of literary fiction are the pleasures of orientation the pleasures of literature are the pleasures of bewilderment.

One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one's favourite writers. It gave one a curious feeling it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one's dressing gown.

She had a grocer's faith in books they can be handed out like Green Stamps and were redeemable for a variety of useful gifts.

Don Quixote is not an imaginary person he is as real as Alexander the Great.

Literature is a microscope it shows us the unseen!

I loved her I didn’t know how to say it without breaking down the autobot façade she saw before her and revealing the ugly and scarred wreck that lived within my skin. So I played with the radio instead.

With me: one minus one = one with you: it’s zero. Here lies the only difference.

You are not what you are You are darkness Looking for light within.

There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata there is a thunder note in an angry sky.

Even great men bow before the Sun it melts hubris into humility.

There are countless circles of hell believers never penetrate the ninth circle.

There are many secrets don’t try to resolve them all.

He confided his deepest secret to you be always wary of his secret.

He thought others were small that was his greatness.

Darkness does not age nothing is always nothing

Unborn eternity does not die existence is dying and falls asleep in the eternity beyond existence.

The world is a fairy tale we are its guardians.

I recreate myself that is my only power.

He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

The crown of literature is poetry.

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.

When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.

Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.

There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, the down trodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

The attitude that poetry should not be analyzed is prevalent among many who consider themselves experts on children's literature. But I suspected that kids like to look closely at things and figure out what makes them go.

But picketing - picketing for or against something, and handing out literature - these are conspicuously formal actions. They have to be understood as indirect communication.

The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature.

At graduation, I assumed I'd be in publishing, but first I went to England and got a master's degree in English Literature. And then I came back to New York and had a series of publishing jobs, the way one does.

When they were done downloading all the information off each hard drive, they took all the computers, all the literature, and loaded everything into a big white truck and left.

I am never long even in the society of her I love without yearning for the company of my lamp and my library.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

A novel is a static thing that one moves through a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.

Chaucer I confess is a rough diamond and must be polished e'er he shines.

I can find my biography in every fable that I read.

Literature is mostly about sex and not much about having children and life is the other way around.

Literature is my utopia.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.

Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade: today it is the reverse.

Oh! Let us never never doubt What nobody is sure about.

Science is uneasy with beginnings. Mythology is concerned above all with what happened "in the beginning". Its signature is "Once upon a time".

The first thing to be done by a biographer in estimating character is to examine the stubs of the victim's cheque books.

The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat with an indolent expression and an undulating throat like an unsuccessful literary man.

The universe is made up of stories not of atoms.

Those expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in the family.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student centuries afterwards who treasures it!

When a man can observe himself suffering and is able later to describe what he's gone through it means he was born for literature.

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him and when he is compelled to exist as it were by his own inner light.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man - the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole its body brevity and wit its soul.

A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.

Literature is a power to be possessed not a body of objects to be studied.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

A perfect judge will read each word of wit with the same spirit that its author writ.

In literary history generation follows generation in a rage.

To be a good diarist one must have a little snouty sneaky mind.

Published memoirs indicate the end of a man's activity and that he acknowledges the end.

It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man having once shown himself capable of original writing is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.