Literature Quotes
231 quotes
"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent"
"Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry."
"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."
"Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one."
"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."
"Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!"
"A good book is an event in my life."
"Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."
"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
"Puns are the highest form of literature."
"Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time."
"That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!"
"It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me."
"I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things."
"He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head."
"Literature is news that stays news."
"Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay."
"No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons."
"She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing for rules or customs. 'Time' for her isn’t something to fight against. Her life flows clean, with passion, like fresh water."
"The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village."
"So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone."
"In the end, you have to choose whether or not to trust someone."
"Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly."
"You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination."
"The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries."
"I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess."
"She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live."
"Sometimes two people have to fall apart, to realize how much they need to fall back together."
"I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine."
"I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves."
"I’ll be your Dostoevsky, if you’ll be my Tolstoy. Our life together will be so full of despair that death will be like a gulag full of joy."
"There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands awayNor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry – This Traverse may the poorest takeWithout oppress of Toll – How frugal is the Chariot That bears a Human soul."
"At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader."
"My soul is in the sky."
"She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells."
"I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language."
"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others."
"The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read."
"A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships."
"Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude."
"Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you."
"Literature is my Utopia"
"If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist."
"When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]"
"Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism."
"There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book."
"I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day."
"The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive."
"If my favorite three letters are X, Z, and Q, then my favorite word is Xazaqazax. It means “a lover of love."
Showing 50 of 231 quotes