28 Quotes About Literature-about-literature

Some artist's greatest work is their own persona and I can only think of what a fleeting and impermanent canvas they've chosen.

It is also part of the humanities’ mission to appreciate exceptions: it would be tragic if literary scholars became so infatuated with charts and graphs that they forgot to mention that Wuthering Heights is rather unlike other novels of its time.

He closed the pages and stuffed them back into his jacket. Keeping his eyes cast downwards as he sipped his wine, he pulled out and lit a cigarette – almost a post-coital gesture. from The Willow Lake Group by Kelly Proudfoot

Literature sustains life because it captures death in its forward march. Clickety-clickety-clack, the wheels go round and round ...

There was something highly literary in the idea of succumbing to a fateful solitary misery, like working myself to death making hats.

Y así, del mismo modo que un amateur de las letras no debe cometer la imprudencia de embarcarse y tratar de cruzar el piélago literario, así una aficionada a las flores no tiene por qué ser una experta jardinera.

If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.

Every object strives for its proper place. A book seeks to be near its truest admirer. Just as this helpless moth seeks to be near the candle that infatuates him.

I walked around the library looking for books. I pulled them off the shelves, one by one. But they were all tricks. They were very dull. There were pages and pages of words that didn't say anything. Or if they did say something they took too long to say it and by the time they said it you already were too tired to have it matter at all. I tried book after book. Surely, out of all those books, there was one.