Enduring Literature Quotes

I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.

The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes.

Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.

The great thing about James Baldwin and his writing is that it's still fresh every time you pick it up. That's also the sad thing about his writing sometimes, too.

Books are the ultimate way for writers to reach immortality.

[Mark] Twain is pointing at you. You, the reader of the book one hundred and thirty years ago and today. That is what has made it a great American novel and the most widely read book in American Literature around the world today.

The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to construct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.

Enduring fame is promised only to those writers who can offer to successive generations a substance constantly renewed; for every generation arrives upon the scene with its own particular hunger.

Soul of the age! The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage! My Shakespeare , rise; I will not lodge thee by Chaucer or Spenser , or bid Beaumont lie A little further, to make thee a room; Thou art a monument, without a tomb, And art alive still, while thy book doth live, And we have wits to read , and praise to give .

How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!

Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.

Poets that lasting marble seek Must come in Latin or in Greek.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

There is a form of literature that is a deed, and a form that is only talk, and the latter passes away like a conversation.

It's an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.

I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time

He who only writes to suit the taste of the age, considers himself more than his writings. We should always aim at perfection, and then posterity will do us that justice which sometimes our contemporaries refuse us.

Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim's Progress?

Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.

A classic is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.

I would argue, for perspective's sake, that the arc of a really literary work is precisely that it both intensely reflects, and simultaneously transcends the conditions of its making. I would say that is the difference between literature and other kinds of writing. That is what the literary is - it ultimately doesn't matter what his circumstances were. And the thing that you were just saying about being sympathetic to Brontë and the fact that she could only write what she wrote when she wrote it... that's true. But look at that novel, which means so much to so many people.

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

I always turn to Frank O'Hara and David Berman's 'Actual Air,' which came out in 1999. He's a poet I haven't tired of.

the writing of some men is like a vast bridge that carries you over the many things that claw and tear. The Wine of Forever