4,370 Quotes About Literature

At my most precarious, I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.

It's marvelous to know another person's entire literary canon by heart. It's like knowing their secret personal language.

It was in that tree that I learned to read, filled with the passions that can only come to the bookish, grasping, very young, bewildered by almost all of what I read, sweating in the attempt to understand a world of adults I fled from in real life but desperately wanted to join in books. (I did not connect the grown men and women in literature with the grown men and women I saw around me. They were, to me, another species.)

One touch can say more than all the world’s words, that’s true, but the touch fades with the years and then we need words again, they’re our weapons against time, death, forgetfulness, unhappiness.

There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.

I finally spoke, my voice trembling. “Hello…Son. I love you. I made you. I’m your God. I will always be there for you. I will do everything I can to keep you safe.”My love for him was so strong.Adam just looked at me, intrigued. He then smiled and opened his arms in a wide embrace. I started crying, feeling his tight hold over me.He then released his grip and said one word: “Daddy.

People who say literature doesn't matter, there are three books from the Middle East that are still shaping the world many centuries later.

In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

Life was so short, and books so countlessly many.