Washington Irving Quotes About Literature
-
There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature. They are like gigantic trees that we sometimes see on the banks of a stream; which, by their vast and deep roots, penetrating through the mere surface, and laying hold on the very foundations of the earth, preserve the soil around them from being swept away by the ever-flowing current, and hold up many a neighboring plant, and perhaps worthless weed, to perpetuity.
→ -
The great British Library --an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or pure English, undefiled wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought.
→ -
The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.
→ -
Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.
→ -
Language gradually varies, and with it fade away the writings of authors who have flourished their allotted time; otherwise, the creative powers of genius would overstock the world, and the mind would be completely bewildered in the endless mazes of literature.
→
Related Authors
-
James F. Cooper Writer -
Mark Twain Author -
Ambrose Bierce Journalist -
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essayist -
Edgar Allan Poe Author -
Robert Louis Stevenson Novelist -
Herman Melville Novelist -
Charles Dickens Writer -
Tim Burton Film director -
O. Henry Writer -
Noah Webster Lexicographer -
-
Jack London Author -
Walt Whitman Poet -
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Physician -
Henry David Thoreau Author -
Emily Dickinson Poet -
Walter Scott Baronet Scott -
Nathaniel Hawthorne Novelist -
William C. Bryant Poet