4,370 Quotes About Literature

I love and hate this place because it is full of words.

Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.

Mr. Herbert DemarestAlexander Hamilton Jr. High2236 Bedford AvenueBrooklyn NYDear Mr Demarest, Then why don't you give him 'Withering Heights'? At least Heathcoat knew how to kick some ass.Chas. Banks3d Base

Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.

The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

La pluma es la lengua del alma: cuales fueren los conceptos que en ella se engendraren, tales serán sus escritos.

[On Female Attraction to Men in Uniform] That male military persona feeds a subconscious, passive-aggressive female desire to dominate the warrior as he is perceived an iconic example of masculinity (particularly amongst traditionally warlike cultures). The damsel in distress theme always struck me as embodying this: the hapless, innocently beautiful woman unwittingly enraptures the heroic male so completely that he would risk all to submit to her at his own peril, and quite in spite of it.

...with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature.

Death, like fiction, is brutal in its symmetry. Take this story and strip it down -all the way back- until you are left with two points. Two dots on a vast, blank canvas, separeted by a sea of white. Here, we have come to the first point, where the batj is drawn and the hand is reachinh for the razor blade. I will meet you at the next, by the axle of a screaming wheel, the revolution of a clock, the closing of an orbit.