3,439 Quotes About Words

I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?

A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,--and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.

I realized that words have power. They have points and edges that can cut deep, and up until then, I wasn’t very careful with them. I was part of the problem.

Literature will save me it's the only certainty i am sure of.

What a glut of books! Who can read them?

I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.

Writing is no more than wending a way in an attempt to restore all of the paths that had been cut-short, headed off at the pass, de-railed, even if worded byways are more dangerous than wooded paths, even if the way of writing is ill-lit, and most of all braced by the uncertainty of solitary passage.

Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.