Quotes about Literature

It strikes me as somewhat odd that the people who use God's name most frequently, both in life and in literature, usually don't believe in him.

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

'Rebecca' by Daphne du Maurier was the first grown-up book I read, when I was aged about 12.

Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.

The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.

Oh, he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains.

One way to approach the book today might be to think of it not as an intimidating, monolithic entity, but as its original readers experienced it—as eight utterly manageable short books to be read over the leisurely course of a year. Another way might be to admit that you do have time to read an eight-hundred-page book, perhaps even according to a swifter timetable than that of George Eliot's first readers. You just need to reorder your priorities.

There is correct English: that is not slang. I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

Sometimes Maggie thought she could have been contented with absorbing fancies; if she could have had all Scott's novels and all Byron's poems!—then, perhaps, she might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life.

In 1847, a certain Count Leopold Ferri died at Padua, leaving a library entirely composed of works written by women, in various languages, and this library amounted to nearly 32,000 volumes.