4,370 Quotes About Literature

A shadow archive and an archive of shadows, the literary architectonic demands a resistance to excessive illumination.

When within yourself you find the road, the right road will open.

What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born.

The holy literature is the Holy Bible.

When your share your story with someone, it becomes their story too.

I remembered how de Man had said to us in class, ‘don’t confuse any of this literary theory with your lives’—how we hadn’t believed him, how we had wanted our criticism to tell us how to think and how to speak and how to live. De Man made literature matter more than anything in the world and then said it was only literature.

La gran literatura no es más que el lenguaje cargado de sentido hasta el grado máximo que sea posible.

The aura of the place had shifted. Maybe I’d previously read or heard something about the cape. I don’t believe in ghosts, per se, but the mind is most definitely a haunted place.

Of course, that’s one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We’re still waiting for the results.