Books Quotes

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.

Cesare Pavese

I know, you've been here a year, you think these people are normal. Well, they're not. WE'RE not. I look in the library, I call up books on my desk. Old ones, because they won't let us have anything new, but I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. Children aren't in armies, they aren't COMMANDERS, they don't rule over forty other kids, it's more than anybody can take and not get crazy.

Orson Scott Card

Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Mark Twain

If another Messiah was born he could hardly do so much good as the printing-press.

G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenb

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.

G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenb

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenb

Remarks are not literature.

Gertrude Stein

Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that

Virginia Woolf

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

Virginia Woolf

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Gaston Bachelard

In the electronic age, books, words and reading are not likely to remain sufficiently authoritative and central to knowledge to justify literature.

Alvin Kernan

What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.

Jonathan Miller

The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.

William Faulkner

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

Wallace Stevens

How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

Wallace Stevens

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

Wallace Stevens

It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.

Graham Greene

No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.

Van Wyck Brooks, From a Writer's

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

Robertson Davies

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

Henry Miller