Quotes about Literature

My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.

You could not open a book in this library that I have not looked into...it is as much as you can expect from a poor man's daughter.

In literature, too, it is not great achievement to memorize what you have read while not formulating an opinion of your own.

Well-written novels make you more empathetic towards other people. You can identify with someone who isn't you. You can change your identity. A 14-year-old boy can become Anna Karenina. It is a miracle.

Practically every movie that shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western literature of the last 300 or 400 years, these are portrayed as awful figures.

My mother, with a Master's in English Literature, taught me to appreciate language and that words matter.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

By the time I went to college, I knew the major passages of the Bible pretty much by heart.

To the first class belong the Gospels and Acts to the second, the Epistles to the third, the Revelation.

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations.

There was indeed a " frightful lot" of books. The four walls of the library were plastered with them from floor to ceiling, save only where the door and the two windows insisted on living their own life, even though an illiterate one.