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Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.
-Joseph Addison
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Books that have become classics -- books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal -- always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.
-Nelson Algren
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The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.
-Aharon Appelfeld
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If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.
-W. H. Auden
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Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
-Roland Barthes
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In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?
-Aubrey Beardsley
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Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge -- they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.
-Vissarion Belinsky
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Child! Do not throw this book about;
Refrain from the unholy pleasure
Of cutting all the pictures out!
Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.
-Hilaire Belloc
dedication to The Bad Child's Book of Beasts (1896)
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The naturalistic literature of this country has reached such a state that no family of characters is considered true to life which does not include at least two hypochondriacs, one sadist, and one old man who spills food down the front of his vest.
-Robert Benchley
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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
-Walter Benjamin
Unpacking My Library, 1931
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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
-Alan Bennett
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The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.
-Hugh Blair
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There are certain books in the world which every searcher for truth must know: the Bible, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Origin of Species, and Karl Marx's Capital.
-W. E. B. Du Bois
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Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.
-George Borrow
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No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.
-Van Wyck Brooks
From a Writer's Notebook, 1958
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All literature is political.
-LeVar Burton
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English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.
-Marilyn Butler
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The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
-Italo Calvino
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When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign -- a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.
-Italo Calvino
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A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
-Italo Calvino
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There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, and what is the use of a book thought Alice, without pictures or conversations?
-Lewis Carroll
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland 1865, Chapter I
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Books about Books
