Quotes · Skopia

24 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Power of literature✕clear

Novel · Modernist literature

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 1.2

Interview · Magazine

I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, "You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and I wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's the truth."

2013

★ 1.2

You can't get at the truth by writing history; only the novelist can do that.

1986

★ 1.8

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years.

1980

★ 1.9

Interview · Magazine

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive.

1963

★ 1.9

Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

2012

★ 1.9

The only substitute for an experience we ourselves have never lived through is art, literature.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nobel Prize Lecture, Nobel Prize Lecture, 1972 · 1972

★ 2.7

Letter · Magazine

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Ernest Hemingway

Esquire · 1934

★ 2.8

Sometimes I think of the books I'll never read that would have changed my life.

Jonathan Safran Foer

2005

★ 3.5

Achilles exists only through Homer. Take away the art of writing from this world, and you will probably take away its glory.

Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand

Les Natchez · 1826

★ 3.5

God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

William Ellery Channing

1838

★ 3.5

Personal journal

Words, so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become, in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

1848

★ 3.5

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

1981

★ 3.5

Reach for the book: It is a weapon.

1935

★ 3.6

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

1938

★ 3.6

Philosophical literature

The reading of good books is like a conversation with the best men of past centuries-in fact like a prepared conversation, in which they reveal only the best of their thoughts.

Discourse on Method · 1637

★ 3.7

Political literature

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are.

Areopagitica · 1644

★ 3.7

Good prose is like a windowpane.

1946

★ 3.8

Hamlet is a name: His speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet.

William Hazlitt

1817

★ 4.2

When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Clifton Fadiman

1957

★ 4.3

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.

1897

★ 5.3

A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.

How Buildings Learn · 1994

★ 5.3

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

1904

★ 7.0

Play · History play

The pen is mightier than the sword.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

1839

★ 9.5