Literary Solace Quotes

Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.

Reading keeps me sane. Growing up, it was my scape, my alternative; it provided both rebellion and peace.

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.

I've always thought that if my death was imminent, I would read. When I can't focus on a book, I tend to keep reading the same page. My guess is, I would've read, like the first page of Nicholas Nickleby over and over again.

Writing is a refuge from unhappiness, but has its own sorrows.

She had begun to read in the beginning as a protection from the frightening and unpleasant things. She continued because, apart from the story, literature brought with it a kind of gentility for which she craved.

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung.

You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.

I carry Yeats with me wherever I go. He's my constant companion. I always can find some comfort in Yeats no matter what the situation is. Months and months and months go by and I know I need to switch to Shelley or somebody else, but right now Yeats is enough for me.

What I would most like to think they would take away, is what I take away when I read my favorite books. Which is the knowledge that there is always somewhere you can go, that you love, and where you're safe. And that's how I feel about my favorite books, wherever I am, if I've got that book with me, I've got a place where I can go and be happy. So if that place is Hogwarts for anyone, then I couldn't be more honored or humbled.

Experience enables me to depose to the comfort and blessing that literature can prove in seasons of sickness and sorrow.

For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone.

I have been told by hospital authorities that more copies of my works are left behind by departing patients than those of any other author.

People don't expect too much from literature. They just want to know they're not alone with being confused.

The anti-apartheid prisoners on the island, like so many in every age and nation, found that Shakespeare had a peculiar ability to gentle their condition. They used to gather clandestinely to read the plays; on one occasion, the book was passed around for each man to mark his favourite lines.

At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation's instrument.

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity.

I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.

As an adolescent, Vonnegut made my life bearable.

We read for instruction, for correction, and for consolation.

I have my books and my poetry to protect me

If we tire of the saints, Shakspeare is our city of refuge.

The venerable dead are waiting in my library to entertain me and relieve me from the nonsense of surviving mortals.

Of all the things that make for happiness, the love of books comes first. No matter how the world may have used us, sure solace lies there.

When I was small and easily wounded books were my carapace. If I were recalled to my hurts in the middle of a book they somehow mattered less. My corporeal life was slight the dazzling one in my head was what really mattered. Returning to books was coming home.