Literature Quotes

I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them

A man’s library is a sort of harem, and like most harems, it is disorganized but dear, and stuffed with exiles and troubadours

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author

A novel, in the end, is a coin struck with one’s own image, a private currency of secret, incommunicable value

A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library

The past is never dead. It’s not even past

There was no one, not even the wind, to listen to the tales she told herself

There is no denying the wild horse in the soul of a story

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten

The writer does not choose her subjects; her subjects choose her

We tell ourselves stories in order to live

The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon

A word after a word after a word is power

You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain; we are creatures of consequence

Literature is the question minus the answer

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world

Words are events, they do things, change things

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced

So many books, so little time

Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself

What is written without effort is, in general, read without pleasure

The house of fiction has not one window, but a million

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind

Books are a uniquely portable magic

A novelist is, above all, someone who relies on his memory, not on his intelligence

In the end, we'll all become stories

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning

We dream in language; our entire life, we dream in language

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote

Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge

The truth is rarely pure and never simple

There is no friend as loyal as a book

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here

Books are the mirrors of the soul

We read to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect

There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature

The books that help you most are those which make you think the most

A story is not only what it says but also what it hides

I am a part of all that I have met

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking

Books break the shackles of time—proof that humans can work magic

The best minds of my generation are destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked

Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so, to make it true

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame

We read to know we are not alone

Fiction is the truth inside the lie

It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry

The world was hers for the reading