To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

A page of a book is like a human face. Look at a page by Hemingway and compare it with Sterne and Marcel Proust. They are different typographical beings. But force upon them those ragged...

A good book is an event in my life.

Knowing, above all, that I would come looking, and find what he had left for me, all that remained of The Jungle Book in the pocket of his doctor’s coat, that folder-up, yellowed page torn...

All classes in proportion to their lack of travel and familiarity with foreign literature are bellicose, prejudiced against foreigners, fond of fighting as a cruel sport — in short, dog-like in their notions of foreign...

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

Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

It may be whispered to those uninitiated people who are anxious to know the habits and make the acquaintance of men of letters, that there are no race of people who talk about books, or,...

Interestingly, this speech by Prospero does not contrast the unreality of the stage with the solid, flesh-and-blood existence of real men and women. On the contrary, it seizes on the flimsiness of dramatic characters as...

If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.

Perhaps the truth is that heavy literature blooms in extremes of temperature.

The Cool Stuff Theory of Literature is as follows: All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about...

Some have speculated that the way [Albert] Camus died made his theories on absurdity a self-fulfilling prophecy. Others would say it was the triumphant meaningful way he lived that allowed him to rise heroically above...

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.

Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows...

One bright day in the last week of February, I was walking in the park, enjoying the threefold luxury of solitude, a book, and pleasant weather.

Sopa yemiş köpeğe kırbacı bir kere gösterin yeter!

Onlar asla ölmemek için ne yaygara koparmışlar, ne dövüşmüşler ne de kendilerini övmüşlerdi. Ölümü soğukkanlılıkla kabul etmişlerdi. Güvensizlik duygusundan uzak olarak yavaş yavaş hazırlanmış ve iyi bir zamanda kısrağı, tayı, ev dokuması mantoyu, çizmeleri kimlerin...

I think of literature – she wrote – as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch...

She’s right. We would compose poems about love and tell stories that have been heard in some form before. But it would be our first time feeling and telling.

Personally I know only one person who wrote about utopia. Afterwards he was executed. I suppose it’s not my genre.

The ambition of much of today’s literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

If birth is a manifestation of life, death is another.

Fly without wings; Dream with open eyes; See in darkness.

One hand I extend into myself, the other toward others.

You are not what you are; You are darkness Looking for light within.

To go where no one else has ever gone before is the secret of heroism.

Even great men bow before the Sun; it melts hubris into humility.

I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched...

Either you will be you or you will not be at all.

Eternity is a glorious word, but eternity is ice.

O perigo de penetrar apaixonadamente no mundo dos livros é o de nos tornarmos, nós próprios, no aglomerado de pequenos excertos literários.

Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only...

We are all one. Everything is meaningless, and yet at the same time meaningful. Everything matters and doesn’t matter just as much,” Wisdom said and looked beyond time.(Nakoma, by Gala.J)

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

It’s not what you lift, it’s where you carry it.

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was...

When the owner of the pig arrived he found a scrawny and bloodcovered white boychild standing on what was left of his property sawing at it with a knife and hauling on the skin and...

He couldn’t imagine using the word ‘rewarding’ about a work of art – for instance that such and such a book has given me so much, taught me so much, etc etc. – but thought...

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

He ate and drank the precious words,His spirit grew robust;He knew no more that he was poor,Nor that his frame was dust.He danced along the dingy days,And this bequest of wingsWas but a book. What...

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in...

When it begins it is like a light in a tunnel, a rush of steel andsteam across a torn up life. It is a low rumble, an earthquake in theback of the mind. My spine...

Çocuk müthişti. Kaldırımda yürümüyordu, ama kaldırımın hemen dibinden, dümdüz bir çizgide yürüyormuş gibi yapıyordu, çoğu çocuklar gibi ve durmadan, “Yakalarsa birini biri, çavdarlar arasında,” şarkısını söylüyordu. Güzel bir sesi vardı. Üstelik, şarkıyı felaket iyi söylüyordu....

Literature should be a kind of revolutionary manifesto against established morality and established society.

(Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about...

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside...