4,370 Quotes About Literature

I realized in a flash that the memory was already literature and that perhaps Lila was right: my book—even though it was having so much success—really was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn’t been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.

No te lamentes sobre el pasado,Ya se ha ido! No te preocupes por el futuro,Quizás, nunca llegará! Viva el presenteDisfruta cada instante!

Хочу особливо наголосити, що «Кобзар» Т.Г. Шевченка — перша книга в друкованому варіанті, яка побувала в космосі.

My definition of literature would be just this: words that have become deeds.

What did I tell you, Fanny, about air-raids not killing people. Here we are, right as rain. My bed simply went through the floor, Plon-plon and I went on it, most comfortable.

I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this. I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop - how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw in me - some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity

But the cultivation and expression of virtue (and vice) and the formation of conscience is not merely an individual act but also a communal one. In addition to shaping individual experience and character, great literature has a role in forming the communal conscience and public virtue. We can understand a great deal about culture—its strengths, its weakness, its blind spots, and its struggles—when we examine the literature it not only produces but reveres.

I put on a martyred expression - like this - as if I was bored to death with every luxury under the sun. I had the time of my life.

If I am ever to live, truly live, it will be for the second time inside a book.