The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.

Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was,...

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself;...

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

Terkadang, salah dan benar hanya dipisahkan oleh sesuatu yang tak pernah ada.

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...

Praise be to God, Who has so disposed matters that pleasant literary anecdotes may serve as an instrument for the polishing of wits and the cleansing of rust from our hearts.

Give yourself to reading.’… You need to read. Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible sound theological works,especially the Puritanic writers, and expositions of the Bible.

God is a cloud from which rain fell.

Into the day as by dream I swim To the music of nourished meaning.

While gazing at myself from yourself, I was beautiful.

All dust is the same dust. Temporarily separated To go peacefully And enjoy the eternal nap.

We traveled long and forgot why poetry was invented.

If an ancient man saw planes two thousand years ago He would’ve thought they were birds Or angels from another world Or messengers from other planets.

From whichever side I start, I think I am in an old place where others have been before me.

Say No! Accept the burdens of revenge.

When the long bygone Lee Po wanted to say something, he could do it with only a few words.

It’s more like a dusty trail, roughly cut out through the underbrush. Most people don’t even notice it. It doesn’t look like a path at all, so they walk right by. Others see it, but...

Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, scrawling his first letters...

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide....

To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of literature as it is possible to get and indeed it is, in my opinion, the...

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

Shakespeare’s bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome...

Good literature is one key to peace. When we stop reading each other, when we stop paying attention to each other’s words and stories, we too easily oppose one another.

I find it sad that more Christian literature does not address miracles, and the possibility of demons in our midst. Jesus performed countless miracles in his life that were clearly discussed in the New Testament....

,Qué importa el nombre del autor en la portada? Trasladémonos con el pensamiento a tres mil años de aquí. Quién sabe qué libros se habrán salvado de nuestra época, y de quién sabe qué autores...

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible...

Bah! You want to hear the vilest thing a man’s done and you want him to be a hero at the same time!

I think people should take mythology much more seriously, because it tells us an awful lot about the history of the human race. We tend to dismiss it as ‘fairy tales,’ when it isn’t. Fairy...

We men of this age are rotten with book-lore and with a yearning for the past.

Ah nerede o günler, gerçekten öldüğüm zaman, şöyle aklı başında biri çıkıp beni denize filan atıverse, ne iyi olurdu. Ne yaparlarsa yapsınlar da, beni lanet bir mezara tıkmasınlar. Pazar günleri millet gelip karnınızın üstüne bir...

..home INSIDE is home shining brightly above all homes in physical world.

Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel.

Charaktere sind vielleicht schon bezeichnet und beschrieben worden, seit es Lebewesen gibt, die sprechen können. Dichter haben das sehr differenziert getan; man denke an Proust, Tolstoi oder Dostojewski. Diese Autoren haben die innere Dynamik eines...

Imagine the same scene in HAMLET if Pullman had written it. Hamlet, using a mystic pearl, places the poison in the cup to kill Claudius. We are all told Claudius will die by drinking the...

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our...

For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.

I am fit for nothing but literature.

There’s a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It’s a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the...

The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a...

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.

En mi época no había Best-Sellers y no podíamos prostituírnos. No había quien comprara nuestra prostitución.