4,370 Quotes About Literature

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes–characters even–caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature is dumb, science is crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.

We read to under­stand our intu­ition of the world, to dis­cover that some­one a thou­sand miles and years away has put into words our most inti­mate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a col­lab­o­ra­tive act.

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries,hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent.