Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited...

Ésta es mi última transmisión desde el planeta de los monstruos. No me sumergiré nunca más en el mar de mierda de la literatura.

The great writings interact with one another. They cannot be read in isolation..

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

History gives us the facts, sort of, but from literary works we can learn what the past smelled like, sounded like, and felt like, the forgotten gritty details of a lost era. Literature brings us...

Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord? Hamlet: Between who? Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its ‘self-help’ section: ‘For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

There was an inevitability about the road towards each other which encouraged meandering along the route.

authors of our days” – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don’t agree?

Matthew Arnold made the horrible prophecy that literature would increasingly replace religion. It has, and it’s taken on all the features of bitter persecution, great intolerance, and traffic in relics. All literature becomes a sacred...

Ahhh, teaching literature. A noble calling! For we are all stories.

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into...

Bilim, ahlaki değerler yaratmaz. Bilim maddi değerler yaratır.

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose...

First time my master’s in English literature ever proved useful.

A novel works it’s magic by putting a reader inside another person’s life. The pace is as slow as life. It’s as detailed as life. It requires you, the reader, to fill in an outline...

Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.” In a horror story, the victim keeps asking why – but there can be...

To hide feelings when you are near crying is the secret of dignity.

If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.

Nothing is inanimate; what is the rest is our interpretation.

Long ago we conquered our passions looking at ourselves in the mirror of eternity.

There are no clear borders, Only merging invisible to the sight.

Those who hate rain hate life.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Is that all?

He confided his deepest secret to you; be always wary of his secret.

We forget old stories, but those stories remain the same.

Absolute is a game with only one player where Absolute forgets itself so it would have a reason to fulfill the motion while returning.

How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who...

I shouted the perfect words to scare him off. It was just the delivery (and only the delivery) that made me sound like a twelve-year-old girl with pee running down her leg. I felt dirty...

I have hopein who I am becoming.I have belief in every scar and disgraceful wordI have ever spokenor been toldbecause it is still teaching meand I have hope in who I am becoming.They say it...

Did you think of anything when Miss Marcy said Scoatney Hall was being re-opened? I thought of the beginning of Pride and Prejudice – where Mrs. Bennet says ‘Netherfield Park is let a last.’ And...

Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look...

Time and death: It’s the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It’s just what’s there. It was not something I planned to do.

Amerikalıların ara sıra toprak kölesi olmayı istedikleri olur, ama köylü sınıfından olmaya karşı hep direnmişlerdir.

They began to come upon chains and packsaddles, singletrees, dead mules, wagons. Saddletrees eaten bare of their rawhide coverings and weathered white as bone, a light chamfering of miceteeth along the edges of the wood....

I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that George Orwell, in his second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter, published in 1935, had borrowed from Joyce for...

En sonra, birinci savaş konseyini, bir sanığa gizli kalan bir belgeye dayanarak hüküm giydirdiği için hukuku çiğnemekle suçluyorum. İkinci savaş konseyini de üstten gelen emre uyarak, bir suçluyu, suçunu bile bile temize çıkarıp ağır adli...

I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, it’s because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death. Searching for the word...

In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman...

We’re not in love with Literature all the time – especially when you have to teach it every day.

[…]vaikystėje mus domina tiktai herojai. Vėliau įgyjame kitokios patirties, herojus keičia personažai, mąstytojai, kitaip sakant, visokio plauko hamletai. Jie kelia iš tiesų svarbias problemas, kartais įžvelgia dramatiškiausius pasaulio aspektus, tačiau vis rečiau kyla noras su...

She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.

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.

Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author’s sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the...

Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can’t. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not...

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.

This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt...

What on earth did you say to Isola? She stopped in on her way to pick up Pride and Prejudice and to berate me for never telling her about Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Why...

The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.