Literature and Words

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.

Books are immortal sons defying their sires.

At the touch of love, Everyone becomes a poet.

A house that has a library in it has a soul.

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’ . . . In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that mankind has invented yet.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

Fiction is Truth’s elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till somebody had told a story.

Fiction is the higher autobiography.

In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled.

English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots; and those whom it once colonized are carving out large territories within the language for themselves. The Empire is striking back.

There is no such thing as “the Queen’s English.” The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people.

Eloquence is a painting of thought.

Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand.

Shame on all eloquence which leaves us with a taste for itself and not for its substance.

Eloquence is feeling pouring itself to other minds, courting their sympathy.

Eloquence, when at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection; but addressing itself entirely to the fancy or the affections, captivates the willing hearers, and subdues their understanding.

Eloquence lies as much in the tone of the voice, in the eyes, and in the speaker’s manner, as in his choice of words.

Eloquence may set fire to reason.

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man’s observation, not overturning it.

We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.