Quotes on “literature”

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.

I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly.

Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.

I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.

The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.

After all, tomorrow is another day!

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.

No man is offended by another man's admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.