Selected Literary Quotations
In addition to our other features, each month a group member identifies a selected quotation for consideration of the group. This quotation can address a variety of topics within the realm of literature. This feature began in 2016, and a complete record of selected quotations can be viewed below.
01/16
CHAPTER ONE MISSION QUOTE: “Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.” — Ezra Pound, author of The Cantos
02/16
“Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.” — David Brin, author of The Postman
03/16
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” — Robert Frost, author of Fire and Ice
04/16
“Nonsense and beauty have close connections.” — E.M. Forster, author of A Room with a View
05/16
“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” — Virginia Woolf, author of A Room of One’s Own
06/16
“Everything is becoming science fiction; from the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.” — J.G. Ballard, author of High Rise
07/16
“Old cookbooks connect you to your past and explain the history of the world.” — José Andrés, chef
08/16
“The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, author of The Left Hand of Darkness
09/16
“A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That’s what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.” — Karen Thompson Walker, author of The Age of Miracles
10/16
“The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.” — T.S. Eliot, author of The Waste Land and The Hollow Men
11/16
“Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.” — Stephen King, author of The Shining and Pet Sematary
12/16
“There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.” — Irving Stone, author of Lust for Life and The Agony and the Ecstasy
01/17
“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” — Italo Calvino, author of Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler
02/17
“Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.” — Helen Keller, author of The Story of My Life and Out of the Dark
03/17
“Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.” — Cassandra Clare, author of The Mortal Instruments
04/17
“Great literature must do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.” — A.E. Housman, author of A Shropshire Lad
05/17
“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.” — Oscar Wilde, author of The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest
06/17
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” — Dr. Seuss, author of The Cat in the Hat and I Can Read with My Eyes Shut!
07/17
“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, author of The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise
08/17
“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.” — Joyce Carol Oates, author of Black Water and Blonde
09/17
“Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.” — Boris Pasternak, author of The Last Summer and Doctor Zhivago
10/17
“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.” — Maya Angelou, author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Reunion
11/17
“The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.” — Northrop Frye, author of Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism
12/17
“Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.” — Mark Twain, author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court