4,370 Quotes About Literature

What are you reading? isn’t a simple question when asked with genuine curiosity; it’s really a way of asking, Who are you now and who are you becoming?

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

Total knowledge is annihilation Of the desire to see, to touch, to feel The world sensed only through senses And immune to the knowledge without feeling.

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. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.

He knows he will be born again, And start fresh anew.

There is no gift of principles, you must apply them if you want to move forward.

We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.