Top 100 Literature Books Quotes
#1. When you realize that your history books and your science books and your literature books are not the result of experts sitting down and making it a wise decision, but of political pressure groups coming to the state textbook hearings, this is wrong.
Diane Ravitch
#2. It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.
E.L. Doctorow
#3. The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
Alan Bennett
#5. By the time we were knit in our mothers' wombs, our lives were like open books before Him
every sentence read, every paragraph indented, every chapter titled, every page numbered. He knew it all in advance
all the sin, all the selfishness, every weakness. Yet He chose to love us
lavishly.
Beth Moore
#6. No, Ben. What I'm asking is: Are you the vehicle, and Georgie rides around in you? That is why Ben's the driver, right?
Jonathan Harnisch
#7. The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
Malcolm X
#8. For someone who made such an enormous contribution to American literature, Mark Twain has been the subject of many books but few major biographies.
Michael Patrick Hearn
#9. Crammed among the stacks of books in his room, the author treated literature as if each book were a window in a city of unstable skyscrapers, and he was the window-washer tasked with the impossible job of cleaning them all. - From "Pageturner" in 365 Tomorrows
Joseph Patrick Pascale
#10. People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!
Mary Gordon
#11. Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.
Dejan Stojanovic
#12. Horror. I can't manage it. I become
well
horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect.
When asked, "Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?" - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by Pamela Paul)
Emma Thompson
#13. There is no book so bad it does not contain something good.
Pliny
#15. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
#16. Whatever it is that you're feeling, whatever it is you have a question about, whatever it is that you long to know, there is some book, somewhere, with the key. You just have to search for it.
Adriana Trigiani
#17. There are countless circles of hell; believers never penetrate the ninth circle.
Dejan Stojanovic
#18. I give pleasure to you. Do not interfere..." #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion
Olga Goa
#20. At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
Lisel Mueller
#21. If you ever meet someone who thinks they are so special, the best thing to do is smile. You don't have to say anything. Be friendly and then go do
your best. That will make you special, too!
Jeff Hutchins
#22. I was a literature major in college and that was my thing, books.
Jodie Foster
#23. Words are just words; a book never harmed anyone by itself.
Rob May
#24. Our existence has always and everywhere been tragic, but man has converted these numberless tragedies into works of art. I know of nothing more astonishing or more wonderful than this transformation.
Maxim Gorky
#25. Literature cannot be imposed; it must be discovered.
Amy Joy
#26. We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit.
Dejan Stojanovic
#27. From the shelf. Ben's stomach churned as he pulled out Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham. Kenzie would enjoy them, but had Marianna ever read those books before? Not that Dr. Seuss was literature. What
Tricia Goyer
#28. The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.
Jamie L. Harding
#29. Now in my opinion it is certainly a complete mistake to suppose that no narrative of events in this type of literature has any significance beyond the purely historical record; but it is equally rash to maintain that every single statement in those books is a complex of allegorical meanings. That
Augustine Of Hippo
#30. A. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.
Cynthia Ozick
#31. He filled a shelf with a small army of books and read and read; but none of it made sense.. They were all subject to various cramping limitations: those of the past were outdated, and those of the present were obsessed with the past.
Alexander Pushkin
#32. If you're going to fall in love with anyone, fall in love with a writer. Allow yourself to become immortalised in words.
Jamie L. Harding
#33. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own - the place where we live - and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.
Cesare Pavese
#35. There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky.
Dejan Stojanovic
#36. Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
Marcel Proust
#37. Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who've helped me.
Bill Hicks
#38. We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
George Eliot
#39. The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#40. Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#41. That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature's other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these take control over form, the result is poor. That is why writers with a strong style often write poor books.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#42. Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.
Idries Shah
#43. There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.
Alberto Manguel
#44. A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.
A.S. Byatt
#45. Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#46. I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.
Maureen Corrigan
#47. 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.
J.D. Salinger
#48. Give her books, where other people did all the running around and courting; it was far easier to read about such matters than to experience them herself.
Sophie Dash
#49. Wherever you look there are inspirations, books, literature, paintings, landscapes, everything. Just living is an inspiration.
Gavin Rossdale
#50. There are people out there who genuinely love literature, who genuinely love to read and read widely, who will never like, or even necessarily get, my books. That was a hard one to swallow, to not feel slighted by.
Lynn Coady
#52. To maintain your honesty , one must know to keep alive the spirit of chidhood
Tushar Upreti
#55. Faith is a question of eyesight; even the blind can see that.
Dejan Stojanovic
#56. 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.
Pat Conroy
#57. Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.
Tom Spanbauer
#58. It's a sort of patronizing idea that literature for children has to feature role models of exemplary behavior. I think not only is that bogus, but it leads to really boring books.
Mac Barnett
#60. To write? Because all this is ging to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left we nothing, we would be naked on earth.
James Slater
#62. It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.
William Faulkner
#63. 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]
Jorge Luis Borges
#64. I have never had the lust to meet famous authors; the best of them is in their books.
Michael Gold
#68. Children's books are often seen as the poor relation of literature. But children are just as demanding as adult readers, if not more so. I should know. I'm a children's writer myself.
David Walliams
#69. Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound
#70. She was addicted to literature like some people were addicted to heroin.
Allie Burke
#71. That's what sofas are for: sit down, drink a cup of tea, talk of literature. At least that's how I see it.
Sophie Divry
#72. The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I've had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered.
Pat Conroy
#73. Let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#74. I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.
Anita Brookner
#75. There is no publication in the scientific literature - in prestigious journals, specialty journals, or books - that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred.
Michael Behe
#76. Although all days are equally long regardless of the season, some days are long not only seasonally but by rewards they offer.
Dejan Stojanovic
#77. Our desire to say more grows bigger and what to say about it, except that saying is not always about saying, growing is not always about growing.
Dejan Stojanovic
#78. Why do people always wonder whether books are any good, without wondering whether they are themselves in a state to profit from them?
Idries Shah
#79. Not that the writers weren't good. I believe in those books and those writers very much. It's just that in the climate it's really hard to keep the lights on and the doors open when you're selling poetry and literature that appeals to a fringe audience.
Henry Rollins
#80. There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.
Stephen R. Covey
#81. Read the great books, gentlemen," Mr. Monte said one day. "Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There's not enough time.
Pat Conroy
#82. Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large.
George Steiner
#83. We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards.
Dejan Stojanovic
#84. Sitting in the brightly lit library, surrounded by books, in total silence, that was ma personal zenith.
Irvine Welsh
#85. Behind Tana there was the sounds of splintering wood, as though something very large had hot the door. "No," she said softly, "Oh no. No."
"Leave me," said Gavriel.
... "Shut up or I might," she told him.
Holly Black
#86. This is the harsh truth about us: not only do Filipinos ignore books, literature - we do not understand how important the arts are - not just to those of us who work at it, but to the nation as a whole.
F. Sionil Jose
#87. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
Barbara Tuchman
#88. If you have feelings about reading, you feel the rhythm of prose or of a poem like music. It awakens something in your soul and then of course you study, read, you grow up and you begin to understand the message and that is the first step towards understanding life.
Maria Kodama
#89. As usual I am suffering much from doubt as to the worth of what I am doing and fear lest I may not be able to complete it so as to make it a contribution to literature and not a mere addition to the heap of books.
George Eliot
#90. Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
Virginia Woolf
#91. Literature is map of humanity, the documenter of civilization. Books introduce us to the landscape of the greatest minds of every century.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#92. Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
Samuel Butler
#94. Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?
Dejan Stojanovic
#95. Black children need to see their lives reflected in the books they read. If they don't, they won't feel welcome in the world of literature. The lives of African-Americans are rich and diverse, and the books our children read should reflect that.
Valerie Wilson Wesley
#96. The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.
Max Lerner
#97. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
Vladimir Nabokov
#98. That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.
Margaret Atwood
#99. I don't know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit.
Pat Conroy
#100. Nothing is inanimate; what is the rest is our interpretation.
Dejan Stojanovic
