The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
Henry JamesTags: literature
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.
Oscar WildeTags: literature historians culture
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
J.D. SalingerTags: reading books writing literature authors
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
Virginia WoolfTags: reading writing 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.
Robert BringhurstTags: writing literature language
Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.
Oscar WildeTags: literature writer
I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.
Margaret MitchellTags: literature
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
Gustave FlaubertTags: reading books literature bibliophile
On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.
Marcel ProustTags: words reading books literature
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
[Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Nov. 1980), pp. 16-32]
Tags: books humanity civilization mind literature thought
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