Quotes about Literature

Francis Bacon once remarked that "some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." Reading a book analytically is chewing and digesting it.

You will also find authors who do not know the difference between theory and practice, just as there are novelists who do not know the difference between fiction and sociology.

The year after How to Read a Book was published, a parody of it appeared under the title How to Read Two Books; and Professor I. A. Richards wrote a serious treatise entitled How to Read a Page.

I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.

That is precisely why you will miss all the deepest meaning of Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest if you reduce their vital and creative statements about life and men to the dry, matter-of-fact terms of history, or ethics, or some other science. They belong to a different order.

The other loan was that of a book. The Headmaster came along, one day, and gave me a little blue book of poems. I looked at the name on the back. "Gerard Manley Hopkins." I had never heard of him. But I opened the book, and read the "Starlight Night" and the Harvest poem and the most lavish and elaborate early poems. I noticed that the man was a Catholic and a priest and, what is more, a Jesuit.

Had I ever read the Life of St. Bernard by Dom Ailbe Luddy?—

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of the long day makes that day happier.

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. [Allein schon das Wissen, dass einen am Ende eines langen Tages ein gutes Buch erwartet, macht diesen Tag zu einem glücklicheren.]

Even in some older literature, such as in the writings of Byzantine historian Philostorgius in the fifth century, Ararat was suggested as the ark's landing site. After the 13th century a.d., more sources affirm this mountain as the landing site.

Both Ararat and Cudi are in the basic region of where the Urartu lived, but whereas Ararat is referred to in some early literature (5th century at the earliest) as the ark's landing site, Mt. Cudi is referred to as the landing site in many more and far earlier sources.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally — and often far more — worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.