Quotes about Literature

When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

What a signal convenience is fame. Do we read all authors to grope our way to the best? No, but the world selects for us the best, and we select from these our best.

This outlook, one that said that American history must be the history of nature speaking through men, not of men shaping nature, became the single most powerful force in American intellectual life in the nineteenth century and shaped some of America's greatest works of literature, such as Moby Dick, Leaves of Grass and Walden, as well as generating an American school of philosophy , to be furthered by William James and John Dewey.

Shallow books make shallow men.)

Historic figures have homes to visit for posterity; the Lord of history left no home. Luminaries leave libraries and write their memoirs; He left one book, penned by ordinary people. Deliverers speak of winning through might and conquest; He spoke of a place in the heart.

He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it. Yossarian

Words! book-words! what are you?

The most remarkable observation one can make about this interface of exilic circumstance and scriptural resource is this: Exile did not lead Jews in the Old Testament to abandon faith or to settle for abdicating despair, nor to retreat to privatistic religion. On the contrary, exile evoked the most brilliant literature and the most daring theological articulation in the Old Testament.

His [the author's] renown… has been purchased, not by deeds of violence and blood, but by the diligent dispensation of pleasure.

For my part, I love to give myself up to the illusion of poetry. A hero of fiction that never existed is just as valuable to me as a hero of history that existed a thousand years ago.

Poetry can be written only because it has been written.