...Quotes on Reading, Writing @ Literature...

Awindlike

“Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
― Marcel Proust

Awindlike

“At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.”
― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading

Awindlike

“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 Mitchell

Awindlike

“A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

Awindlike

“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]”
― Barbara W. Tuchman

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“I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.”
― E.M. Forster

Awindlike

“The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read.”
― Benjamin Franklin

Awindlike

“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."

[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]”
― Jorge Luis Borges

Awindlike

“If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.”
― Charles Baudelaire

Awindlike

“Literature is my Utopia”
― Helen Keller

Awindlike

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”
― Harold Bloom

Awindlike

“There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle

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(Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.)”
― Thomas à Kempis

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“Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other”
― Anton Chekhov

Awindlike

“Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.”
― Alberto Manguel

Awindlike

“A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...”
― Vladimir Nabokov

Awindlike

“All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.”
― Franz Kafka

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“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”
― C.S. Lewis

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“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”
― Tom Waits

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“To hide feelings when you are near crying is the secret of dignity.”
― Dejan Stojanovic