607 quotes found
“Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none”
“Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.”
“There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted...”
“To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.1010 One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature ...”
“Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself in the grounds; when I went down to the gates and looked through them along the road; or when, w...”
“...there are only two things that really matter in life. Literature and love.”
“You must be more gentle, dear, more sedate,' Ellen told her daughter. 'You must not interrupt gentlemen when they are speaking, even if you do think you know more about matters than they do. Gentle...”
“I love and hate this place because it is full of words.”
“Two adolescent girls on a hot summer night--hardly the material of great literature, which tends to endow all male experience (that of those twin brothers who found themselves adrift so many years ...”
“So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been s...”
“Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.”
“Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.”
“Literature is a writer's secret life recorded in symbols.”
“The end of the world can be cozy at times.”
“I shall tell you what I believe. I believe God is a librarian. I believe that literature is holy...it is that best part of our souls that we break off and give each other, and God has a special dis...”
“...with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature.”
“There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn...”
“If a teacher has only love for the cause, it will be a good teacher. If a teacher has only love for student, as a father, mother, he will be better than the teacher, who read all the books, but has...”
“If you want to know a country, read its writers.”
“There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.”
