Quotes on Literature

A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.

It's wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why doesn't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.

A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy. Why it may be a frustrating play thing - one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them - it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled. [...] Alas! the brain is a toy that plays games of its own. Its very most favorite game is the one-thing-leads-to-another game.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites...some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

Money, like vodka, turns a person into an eccentric.

I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilized and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women.

If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport.

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, & it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses—the imagination’s vision, & the imagination’s hearing—& the moral sense, & the intellect. This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks & exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.

You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature.

She missed him the days when some pretext served to take him away from her, just as one misses the sun on a cloudy day without having thought much about the sun when it was shining.