Quotes about Literature

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.

I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five

Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.

But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.

Bright people often have a good load to carry. But boredom is seldom a part of it. It's all right. I'm always pleased to see just that small bit deeper. You deny our brotherhood. Insisting as you do in your sly way that our genealogies and our socioeconomic standings have set us apart at birth in a manner not to be contravened. But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville.

The real joy of a book lies in reading it over and over again, and always finding it different, coming upon another meaning, another level of meaning.

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.

Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry

This is no book; Who touches this, touches a man; (Is it night? Are we here alone?) It is I you hold, and who holds you; I spring from the pages into your arms...

Here I sit gossiping in the early candle-light of old age—and my book—casting backward glances over our travel'd road.

The fairy tale belongs to the child and ought always to be within his reach, not only because it is his special literary form and his nature craves it, but because it is one of the most vital of the textbooks offered to him in the school of life. In ultimate importance it outranks the arithmetic, the grammar, the geography, the manuals of science; for without the aid of the imagination none of these books is really comprehensible.