Quotes about Literature
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have
— Henry David Thoreau
The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.
— Herman Melville
Of course, there are those critics - New York critics as a rule - who say, 'Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it's good but then she's a natural writer.' Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.
— Maya Angelou
Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.
— Toni Morrison
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
There is a quiet revolution going on in the study of the Bible. At its center is a growing awareness that the Bible is a work of literature and that the methods of literary scholarship are a necessary part of any complete study of the Bible.
— Leland Ryken
The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.
— Samuel Johnson
My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.
— Margaret Atwood
From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady on the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.
— Frederick Buechner
A home without books is a body without soul.
— Cicero
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
— CS Lewis
The people that usually have the most trouble with my books are the ones that pick them apart from a theological point of view.
— Frank Peretti