#literature

"I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey."

"Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry."

"You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination."

"Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head."

"You not only are hunted by others, you unknowingly hunt yourself."

"Heavenly bodies are nests of invisible birds."

"It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me."

"Trying to live up to yourself is the most trying thing."

"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; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself."

"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book."

"Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination."

"You don’t know anything, but I know even less."

"A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature."

"Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly."

"The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves."

"There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book."

"You mark and celebrate errors, transforming failures into successes."

"A good book is an event in my life."

"Words his soul danced to."

"You must go on.I can’t go on.I’ll go on."