Literature and Words

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

A noble metaphor, when it is placed to an advantage, casts a kind of glory around it, and darts a luster through a whole sentence.

Each man’s memory is his private literature, and every recollection affects us with something of the penetrative force that belongs to the work of art.

Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word.

To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.

What a lost person needs is a map of the territory . . . so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is a map, a geography of the mind.

The warehouse of that memory is called the library.

A man’s library is a sort of harem.

The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.

I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.

One can resist the invasion of armies; one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

An idea launched like a javelin in proverbial form strikes with sharper point on the hearer’s mind and leaves implanted barbs for meditation.

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!

All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

IF BOOKS ARE NOT GOOD COMPANY, WHERE WILL I FIND IT?

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

Having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.

A BOOK IS A FRAGILE CREATURE, IT SUFFERS THE WEAR OF TIME, IT FEARS RODENTS, THE ELEMENTS, CLUMSY HANDS.