Children’s and YA books are about being brave and kind, about learning wisdom and love, about that journey into and through maturity that we all keep starting, and starting again, no matter how old we...

The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one’s life.

We read to under­stand our intu­ition of the world, to dis­cover that some­one a thou­sand miles and years away has put into words our most inti­mate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a...

My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching.

En yakın arkadaşım, Matriyona yoktu artık… Son gününde bir kazak yüzünden nasılda azarlamıştım!

Adlar daima insana dert oluyordu. Hayat ve zevkler değişir ama adlar kalır.

Literature cannot be imposed; it must be discovered.

Through books I discovered everything to be loved, explored, visited, communed with. I was enriched and given all the blueprints to a marvelous life, I was consoled in adversity, I was prepared for both joys...

And that was the point of children, thought Caroline Meddey: to bind us to the earth and to the present, to distract us from death.

In a myriad of ways you tell one truth.

New Rome will be destroyedBy the attacks of new vandals.God always remains silent.

Creators of history always play with our impotence and our ignorance.

Creating means living.

When everything hurries everywhere, nothing goes anywhere.

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...

The desire for glory is no different from that instinct for preservation that is common to all creatures. It is as if we enhance our being if we can gain a place in the memory...

No, Ben. What I’m asking is: Are you the vehicle, and Georgie rides around in you? That is why Ben’s the driver, right?

It didn’t help that I was never allowed to study anything remotely contemporary until the last year of university: there was never any sense of that leading to this. If anything, my education gave me...

He whom the gods love dies young.

The re-evaluation and rediscovery of minority art (including the cultural minority of women) is often conceived as a matter of remedying injustice and exclusiveness through doing justice to individual artists by allowing their work into...

Thus like a Captive in an Isle confin’d,Man walks at large, a Pris’ner of the Mind

Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do...

In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus...

Recognize that you have been chosen to be alive, right now, at this exact moment in time and know that none of that is random. There is something about you, your past or your future...

Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.

Which is probably one of the reasons those of us who love contemporary fiction love it as we do. We’re alone with it. It arrives without references, without credentials we can trust. Givers of prizes...

When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves.