#literature

"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."

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

"To risk life to save a smile on a face of a woman or a child is the secret of chivalry."

"Total knowledge is annihilation Of the desire to see, to touch, to feel The world sensed only through senses And immune to the knowledge without feeling."

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

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

"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]"

"For a game, you don’t need a teacher."

"Literature is the real life of imaginary people."

"The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary."

"I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple."

"I regained my soul through literature after those times I'd lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets."

"The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries."

"Puns are the highest form of literature."

"I feel friendship towards philosophers, but towards sophists, teachers of literature, or any other such kind of godforsaken people, I neither feel friendship now, nor may I ever do so in the future."

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

"People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature."

"For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born with a talent for which there was at present no objective."

"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."

"One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer."