What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.
Interpretation
A great book remains relevant across generations, continually resonating with readers.
This quote emphasizes the timeless quality of a classic book, suggesting that its themes, insights, and narratives resonate with readers of different eras. Despite the author being long gone, the book's ability to speak to contemporary audiences highlights its enduring relevance and the universal truths it conveys.
In practice
A teacher might use this quote to inspire students to appreciate classic literature.
A book is one of the most patient of all man's inventions. Centuries mean nothing to a well-made book. It awaits its destined reader, come when he may, with eager hand and seeing eye. Then occurs one of the great examples of union, that of a man with a book, pleasurable, sometimes fruitful, potentially world-changing, simple; and in a library...witho ut cost to the reader.
Books, books, books in all their aspects, in form and spirit, their physical selves and what reading releases from their hieroglyphic pages, in their sight and smell, in their touch and feel to the questing hand, and in the intellectual music which they sing to the thoughtful brain and loving heart, books are to me the best of all symbols, the realest of all reality.
Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.
I can speak of my own criterion for judging whether or not a book is good or bad. I ask of it a single question, From how deep and true an impulse did it spring? Was it written merely to shock? Only to make money? Or was it written to create something more perfect and more lasting than the life experience from which it came?
No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.
This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.
The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.
There were epochs in the history of humanity in which the writer was a sacred person. He wrote the sacred books, universal books, the codes, the epic, the oracles. Sentences inscribed on the walls of the crypts; examples in the portals of the temples. But in those times the writer was not an individual alone; he was the people.
Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.
I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.
I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.'
To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.
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