LITERATURE QUOTES
quotations about literature
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
JEAN COCTEAU
attributed, Where Books Fall Open
An interchange of literature is the conversation of nations.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The history of literature is the history of the human mind.
WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT
"Chateaubriand's English Literature", Critical and Historical Essays
Literature is the garden of wisdom.
JAMES ELLIS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. It deepens our natural sensibilities, and strengthens by exercise our intellectual capacities. It stores up the accumulated experience of the race, connecting Past and Present into a conscious unity; and with this store it feeds successive generations, to be fed in turn by them.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
The Principles of Success in Literature
Literature is a great staff, but a very sorry crutch.
SIR WALTER SCOTT
attributed, Day's Collacon
Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do -- it can make us identify with situations and people far away. If it does that, it's a miracle.
CHINUA ACHEBE
The Altantic Online, Aug. 2, 2000
Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers.
ROBERTO BOLANO
2666
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
We think literature is immortal, but even that decays and ultimately turns to dust.
MICK FARREN
Darklost
Literature is the expression of the thoughts of society. Books are specimens of the conversations of an age, preserved in the spirit of taste and of genius.
PROFESSOR HUXLEY
attributed, Day's Collacon
Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.
GAO XINGJIAN
"Literature as Testimony: The Search for Truth", Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium
There is a form of literature that is a deed, and a form that is only talk, and the latter passes away like a conversation.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Paris Review, winter-spring 1967
Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
speech, Feb. 6, 1990
One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw", Other Inquisitions
All literature is but a word--a thought--a maxim amplified.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Literature: The art of putting old words into new places.
EDWARD BLANCHARD
Flights of Fancy
For me, the purpose of literature is to preserve the stories of that which disappears easily. That which is long-lasting, like the pharaohs and pyramids, doesn't need literature.
GEORGI GOSPODINOV
"Georgi Gospodinov: enter the world of the Bulgarian writer taking on empathy, sorrow and stereotypes", The Calvert Journal, August 13, 2018
While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave