4,370 Quotes About Literature

There are people who, the more you do for them, the less they will do for themseselves.

I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.

My life transformed by making myself a reader.

To read Shakespeare is to feel encompassed -- the plays contain practically every word I know, practically every character type I have ever met, and practically every idea I have ever had.

— Любити писання — це найважливіша якість людини, що готується стати письменником.— Однак цього не досить.— Звичайно. Лише цього не досить. У творі має бути щось особливе. Принаймні щось, чого не можна вичитати до кінця в самому тексті. Якщо торкнутися прози, то понад усе я ставлю твори, в яких є щось недомовлене. Коли, прочитавши твір, я все зрозумів, то втрачаю до нього цікавість. Мовляв, це ж очевидно. Дуже просто.

And it suggests this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left-say we lost everything-we'd still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognised line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we've forgotten we even know it.

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.

Like some wondrous birds out of fairy tales, books sang their songs to me and spoke to me as though communing with one languishing in prison; they sang of the variety and richness of life, of man’s audacity in his strivings towards goodness and beauty.

Reading is an intimate act, perhaps more intimate than any other human act. I say that because of the prolonged (or intense) exposure of one mind to another.