Quotes about Reading and Studying Literature

“The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.”

Elizabeth Drew

“When we read great literature, something changes in us that stays changed.  Literature remembered becomes material to think with.”

Donald Hall

“We read to know we are not alone.”

C. S. Lewis

“Undoubtedly, there is a right way of reading,—so it be sternly subordinated.  Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.  Books are for the scholar's idle times.  When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.  But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must,—when the soul seeth not, when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining,—we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is.  We hear, that we may speak.  The Arabian proverb says, ‘A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful.’

“It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books.  They impress us ever with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads.  We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy,—with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses.  There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well nigh thought and said.  But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some pre-established harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub they shall never see.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Art isn’t a truth; it is a lie that helps us to see the truth.”

Picasso

“Plays don’t have a message, just as teachers don’t teach; they provide an atmosphere or an environment for learning.”

Dominic Taylor, Associate Artistic Director, Penumbra Theatre, Saint Paul, MN

“In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. . . . It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.”

S. I. Hayakaw, “an all-around scholar” and one-time U.S. Republican Senator

“These were choice documents to me.  I read them over and over again with unabated interest.  They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance.”

Frederick Douglass

“The ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”

Malcolm X

“There are three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind.  It is most important of all to reach the heart of the reader.”

Robert Frost

“The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.”

Abraham Lincoln

“To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.”

Gaston Bachelard

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.  You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world.  You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”

Angela Carter

“It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can’t do anything else, read all that you can.”

Jane Hamilton

“Each time we reread a book, we get more out of it because we put more into it; a different person is reading it, and therefore it is a different book.”

Muriel Clark

“When we read a story, we inhabit it.  The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.  What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story.  And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.”

John Berger

“We get no good by being ungenerous, even to a book, and calculating profits. . . . It is rather when we gloriously forget ourselves and plunge soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound, impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth – ‘T is then we get the right good from a book.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning