Litcrit Quotes & Sayings

Well, a change of scenery may be good for you," said Hobie when I went down to see him before I left. "Even if the scene isn't what you'd choose. — Donna Tartt

We may exhort ourselves to read tolerantly, we may quote Coleridge on the willing suspension of disbelief until we think ourselves totally suspended in a relativistic universe, and still we will find many books which postulate readers we refuse to become, books that depend on 'beliefs' or 'attitudes' ... which we cannot adopt even hypothetically as our own. — Wayne C. Booth

He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little wings that can be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles and miles in a blundering flight. Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. (This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.) — Vladimir Nabokov

Christmas poem to a man in jail
hello Bill Abbott:
I appreciate your passing around my books in
jail there, my poems and stories.
if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with
my books, fine.
but literature, you know, is difficult for the
average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too);
I don't like most poetry, for example,
so I write mine the way I like to read it. — Charles Bukowski

It is problematic because, taken together, the whole--composed of lies and truth--forms a truth of its own. — Robin Feuer Miller

We know what we want to do, but are afraid of hurting those around us by abandoning everything in order to pursue our dream. — Anonymous

You made me feel what summertime really is. Underneath what's bright, you knew the hot dark rasp of it. — Ava Dellaira

It wasn't my finest moment, but I rolled my eyes and actually huffed. "Fine, don't answer. I don't even know why I asked."
"No, I am not having sex with anyone."
"Oh." I shrugged nonchalantly, but for some reason his response filled me with glee. It was as if a unicorn had appeared beneath a double rainbow and started tap dancing. — Penny Reid