literary reverence Quotes

I hear Shakespeare, sometimes, the way other people might hear God or Marx or something. But he's so different from that.

The magic word 'Shakespeare' always freezes you in your chair.

Every old poem is sacred.

As much as I revere great writing, and am still humbled by it, literary activities are no longer esoteric to me. When I read a great novel - something that I could never have written myself - I'm still looking at it a little bit like a technician.

What is a great love of books? It is something like a personal introduction to the great and good men of all past times. Books, it is true, are silent as you see them on their shelves; but, silent as they are, when I enter a library I feel as if almost the dead were present, and I know if I put questions to these books they will answer me with all the faithfulness and fulness which has been left in them by the great men who have left the books with us.

Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.

What needs my Shakespeare for his honour'd bones,- The labour of an age in piled stones? Or that his hallow'd relics should be hid Under a star-y-pointing pyramid? Dear son of memory, great heir of fame, What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?

Alice Munro is not only revered, she is cherished, her stories handled lovingly, turned over and over, gazed at and studied and breathed in with something approaching awe. She has never, over the years, written the way any of her contemporaries have.

When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?

Blanche: No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drugstore Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!

Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which who listen had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears.

I always thought of writing as holy. I still do. It’s not something to be approached casually.

Books must be treated with respect, we feel that in our bones, because words have power. Bring enough words together they can bend space and time.