Alicia Hoffman > Alicia's Quotes

“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

[Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Nov. 1980), pp. 16-32]”
― Barbara Tuchman

“In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.”
― C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

“Literature is news that stays news.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.”
― E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy

“Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.”
― Romain Gary

“Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.”
― Anthony Doerr

“The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.”
― Anthony Burgess

“We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.”
― F. Sionil José, In Search of the Word: Selected Essays

“Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Man-Made World

“You'll never be alone if you’ve got a book.”
― Al Pacino

“We read to under­stand our intu­ition of the world, to dis­cover that some­one a thou­sand miles and years away has put into words our most inti­mate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a col­lab­o­ra­tive act.”
― Alberto Manguel

“Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.”
― Mark Slouka, Brewster

“If you want to know a country, read its writers.”
― Aminatta Forna

“A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: The Death-Bed Edition

“Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it’s probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it’s like to be that lobster in the pot, that’s in poetry too.”
― Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction