Quotes about Literature
People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.
— Malcolm X
Life is short, but art is long. Sophocles is dead, but Oedipus lives on…Each of us when we read a great piece of literature is a little more human than before.
— James Sire
Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own.
— James Sire
Don't you ever mind, she asked suddenly, not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?
— Edith Wharton
He took [the book] up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions.
— Edith Wharton
as usual, kept the fire alive and the lamp trimmed; and the room, with its rows and rows of books
— Edith Wharton
He hasn't written a line for twenty years. A line of what? What kind of literature can one keep corked up for twenty years? Wade surprised him. The real kind, I should say.
— Edith Wharton
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
— Aldous Huxley
Every man's memory is his private literature.
— Aldous Huxley
Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.
— William Temple
Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.
— Joseph Brodsky
You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up.
— Margaret Atwood