Old Literature Quotes

There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.

Spake full well, in language quaint and olden, One who dwelleth by the castled Rhine, When he called the flowers, so blue and golden, Stars, that in earth's firmament do shine.

I'll write to you. A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel

When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.

I’m rather apt to read old books than new.

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.

A lot of my time is spent reading antique or out-of-print books of reference.

It's in Macbeth: "The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon." I seldom have occasion to pull it out, but it's ready and waiting!

Every old poem is sacred.

When a new book is published, read an old one.

She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

In our fathers' time nothing was read but books of feigned chivalry, wherein a man by reading should be led to none other end, but only to manslaughter and bawdry.

An old novel has a history of its own.

A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is To meet an antique book In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think, His venerable hand to take, And warming in our own, A passage back, or two, to make To times when he was young. His quaint opinions to inspect, His knowledge to unfold On what concerns our mutual mind, The literature of old.

My days among the dead are passed; Around me I behold, Where'er these casual eyes are cast, The mighty minds of old; My never-failing friends are they, With whom I converse day by day.

In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern.

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

Let's have some good, old-fashioned literature, with a virgin and a moral.

When a new book appears one should read an old one.

There is a good saying to the effect that when a new book appears one should read an old one. As as author I would not recommend too strict an adherence to this saying.

My mother used to take my brother and me to get any books we wanted, but they were second hand books published in the '30s and '40s. I liked scary books.

Introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things; and I am here introducing a short, small story of my own which appeared in The Evening News about ten months ago.

I was a kid when I read Jane Eyre and fell in love with that universe. I didn't have the acumen to say the prose is old or the prose is too complex. I just fell in love with Jane's very lonely soul, much the same way I fell in love with Frankenstein's creature for the same reason. Those old souls exist in every decade in every century.