Top 100 Quotes About Literature And Books
#1. Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who've helped me.
Bill Hicks
#2. 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.
George Gissing
#3. I read whenever possible, and I buy books all the time, sometimes online, but mostly from bookshops. I love literature. If you want to understand art, it's important to understand what is also happening in literature, in music, in science, in architecture.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#4. It may be whispered to those uninitiated people who are anxious to know the habits and make the acquaintance of men of letters, that there are no race of people who talk about books, or, perhaps, who read books, so little as literary men.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#5. Kindness is like a warm blanket of snow, softly covering and gently touching the heart.
Heather Wolf
#6. What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
A.S. Byatt
#7. You have to read a book at the right time for you, and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature.
Doris Lessing
#8. In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home.
Henry David Thoreau
#9. Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.
Elizabeth Von Arnim
#10. You are like the winged goddess from Greek mythology. As beautiful and soaring like an angel as her". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion:
Olga Goa
#11. Of Books and Scribes there are no end:
This Plague--and who can doubt it?
Dismays me so, I've sadly penned
Another book about it.
Robert W. Service
#12. Publishers are businesses and I don't blame them for that. If they didn't make money by publishing books, there wouldn't be any books.
Johnny Rich
#13. Beyond all vanities, fights, and desires, omnipotent silence lies.
Dejan Stojanovic
#14. The Hebrew Bible is the supreme example of that rarest of phenomena, a national literature of self-criticism. Other ancient civilisations recorded their victories. The Israelites recorded their failures. It is what the Mosaic and prophetic books are about.
Jonathan Sacks
#15. Maybe it was that nearly everyone else was dead and she felt a little bit dead too, but she figured that even a vampire deserved to be saved. Maybe she ought to leave him, but she wasn't going to.
Holly Black
#16. Originally I had planned to write just a couple of children's books and then, return the focus on adult literature. A funny thing happened along the way - I kept having new ideas, and then I looked up one day, and 30 years had passed!
Nikki Grimes
#17. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.
Helen Keller
#18. What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
Doris Lessing
#19. Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.
Bohumil Hrabal
#20. Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own.
James W. Sire
#22. If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn't write a single word, but that would be tragic.
Dejan Stojanovic
#23. My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.
Gabrielle Zevin
#24. Children's books do not exist in a vacuum, unrelated to literature as a whole. They are a portion of universal literature and must be subjected to the same standards of criticism as any other form of literature.
Lillian H. Smith
#25. I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.
Susan Sontag
#26. Every day, they gave him new reasons to smile, laugh, worry, and wonder.
C.J. Milbrandt
#27. Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers.
Walter Kirn
#28. Regarding children's literature, look for interesting content and well-constructed sentences clothed in literary language. The imagination should be warmed and the book should hold the interest of the child. Life's too short to spend time with books that bore us.
Deborah Taylor-Hough
#29. A book can open the mind, free the heart, and speak to the soul.
Jason Ellis
#30. Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.
Lawrence Clark Powell
#31. Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.
Fran Lebowitz
#32. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books. (p. 5)
Rabih Alameddine
#33. A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.
Richard Flanagan
#34. The Alice books belong to a branch of literature that speaks deeply and clearly to the human psyche--stories of the journey.
Stephanie Lovett Stoffel
#35. Literature has always been a part of my life. I studied history and literature in college. My mother is a novelist; I grew up around books.
Elliot Ackerman
#36. One generation's pleasure became a burden for another. Hence, entire collections from father to son were sold for a song, and the vendors, knowing nothing about literature, would place a price on the books. (about secondhand literature book)
Murzban F. Shroff
#37. There is a very big difference between writing for children and writing for young adults. The first thing I would say is that 'Young Adult' does not mean 'Older Children', it really does mean young but adult, and the category should be seen as a subset of adult literature, not of children's books.
Garth Nix
#38. I read every one of the books on the shelf marked American Negro Literature. I became a nationalist, a colour nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me.
Peter Abrahams
#39. I love literature deeply. I view books as sacred things, and in writing my story, I'm going to do my best to honor the form that has played such a huge part in shaping who I am.
Flea
#40. Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child ... Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence.
Orson Scott Card
#41. I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.
Virginia Woolf
#42. Children's books aren't textbooks. Their primary purpose isn't supposed to be "Pick this up and it will teach you this." It's not how literature should be. You probably do learn something from every book you pick up, but it might be simply how to laugh.
J.K. Rowling
#43. I've always loved literature, and the best books I read were always trilogies.
Dawn Angelique
#44. What are you reading? isn't a simple question when asked with genuine curiosity; it's really a way of asking, Who are you now and who are you becoming?
Will Schwalbe
#45. Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.
Orhan Pamuk
#46. Books have that strange quality, that being of the frailest and tenderest matter, they outlast brass, iron and marble.
William Drummond
#47. The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.
James Goldsmith
#48. Dear Literary World, Sorry for breaking down your door ... I'll pay for that!!! Since I'm here and planning to stay a while, let me tell you some stories!!
C.K. Webb
#49. I am the girl who spends hours huddled in a corner of a library, trying to find what you love the most about Marlowe, just so I can write you a poem worthy of Shakespeare. I've made books my lovers, hours my enemies and you the only story.
Nikita Gill
#50. You're like, both like, Alexander the Great.'
We can't both be Alexander.'
Well sometimes I think you're two side of the same coin, and I'm the metal in between.
Orson Scott Card
#51. Writing is about taking everyday observations, things which people see almost every day of their lives, and yet bringing it to their attention for the very first time.
Jamie L. Harding
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.
Maureen Corrigan
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#64. 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
#65. Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.
Tom Spanbauer
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. I was a literature major in college and that was my thing, books.
Jodie Foster
#70. 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
#71. At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
Lisel Mueller
#72. 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
#73. Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.
Dejan Stojanovic
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
Samuel Butler
#78. We nurture the candle flames that show the way ahead. We are guerrillas of the word, unsung heroes breathing softly on the embers of the human mind, so that they might re-ignite the hearths around which we once found safe haven. The book is the Light and the Life.
Mark Cantrell
#79. The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.
Ross Macdonald
#80. You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.
Ray Bradbury
#81. Our pleasures in literature do not, I think, decline with age; last 1st of January was my eighty-second birthday, and I think that I had as much enjoyment from books as I ever had in my life.
Maria Edgeworth
#82. We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.
Christopher Hitchens
#83. Yet when books have been read and reread, it boils down to the horse, his human companion, and what goes on between them.
Walter Farley
#84. There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.
Eleanor Catton
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Growing up, I loved the tale of Peter Rabbit and also books on Pippi Longstocking. Pippi was a girl who had so much fun and was very daring. My sons loved all the Dr. Seuss books
Soraya Diase Coffelt
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.
Anita Brookner
#97. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
