Top 83 Matthew Pearl Quotes
#1. Though an angel should write, still 'tis devils must print
Matthew Pearl
#3. The book I'm working on next, which will be my fifth, returns to literary history. I really do love literary history, and I have plenty more ideas on it.
Matthew Pearl
#4. I don't like my birthday. I don't like things that are directed towards me. It took me a long time to get over people asking me to write my name in the book.
Matthew Pearl
#5. A man was leaning idly against an elm ... The man, who towered over the poet even at his slanting angle, too old for a student and too worn for a faculty member, stared at him with the familiar, insatiable gleam of the literary admirer.
Matthew Pearl
#6. There's a remarkable power about reading together, reading collectively, that's brought out by reading groups.
Matthew Pearl
#7. I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants.
Matthew Pearl
#8. Surprisingly, it was not an American but a British company that opened an amusement park in 2007 called Dickens World, located in the English county of Kent, complete with an Ebenezer Scrooge Haunted House, a Great Expectations Boat Ride and the as-advertised 'costumed Dickensian characters.'
Matthew Pearl
#9. Surprises, like misfortunes, seldom come alone.
Matthew Pearl
#10. Milton was the gold standard of religious poets for English and American scholars. But Milton wrote of Hell and Heaven from above and below, respectively, not from the inside: safer advantages.
Matthew Pearl
#11. Teacher, tender comrade, wife,
A fellow farer true through life,
Heart whole and soul free,
The August father gave to me.
Matthew Pearl
#12. Books inspire a man to embrace the world or flee it. They start wars and end them. They make the men and women who write and publish them vast fortunes, and nearly as quickly can drive them into madness and despair. Stay away from what you do not fathom from now on ...
Matthew Pearl
#13. When it comes to referring to Dickens's life, performing plays with your nine children for friends and family during Christmas is Dickensian.
Matthew Pearl
#14. As a writer of historical fiction, I believe you don't want to fictionalize gratuitously; you want the fictional aspects to prod and pressure the history into new and exciting reactions.
Matthew Pearl
#15. Books do pretend ... but squeezed in between is even more that is true - without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see?
Matthew Pearl
#16. People hate the idea of politicians, you see, but love the idea of authors, at least until they meet one.
Matthew Pearl
#17. These writers take the essence of every person around them, turn them into books and stories without permission or even a simple thank-you, and want all the credit and glory for themselves.
Matthew Pearl
#18. These tears were difficult: they didn't want to come out and they didn't want to stay in.
Matthew Pearl
#19. Now, on his way to another lecture, the very thought of entering a room full of students, who still thought it was possible to learn all about something, made him yawn.
Matthew Pearl
#20. Porter Square Books was the only place I could find that was dog-friendly, work-friendly, and had food. I was there all the time.
Matthew Pearl
#21. Remember that there are two things in this life that are never worth crying about: what can be cured and what cannot be cured.
Matthew Pearl
#22. Considering what a prolific writer Dickens was, the word 'Dickensian' could legitimately cover a vast thematic territory, explaining at least some of the variety of its applications.
Matthew Pearl
#23. There was still the temptation to believe the world was a mere trap for human sin. But sin, the way he saw it, was only the failure of an imperfectly made being to keep a perfect law.
Matthew Pearl
#24. Imagine! It is the real power of a book
not what is on the page, but what happens when a reader takes the pages in, makes it part of himself. That is the definition of literature.
Matthew Pearl
#25. They always blamed my reading, you know, for my having fewer friends than my brother and for my weak eyes, never thinking that because I had weak eyes and because I was shy, having a book at the ready rescued me.
Matthew Pearl
#26. Films have become shorter in length, jumpier in style, and simpler in story so that they can be more easily transferred to once under-exploited international markets.
Matthew Pearl
#27. I do not seek the mantle of genius. I am an appreciator, an observer, a preposition, and content in that, and that's me in a nutshell.
Matthew Pearl
#28. Dante's Hell is part of our world as much as part of the underworld, and shouldn't be avoided, Lowell said, but rather confronted. We sound the depths of Hell very often in this life.
Matthew Pearl
#29. Beware the camel's nose - for its whole body will soon follow.
Matthew Pearl
#30. For several years at the University of Virginia, students had an annual tradition of raising hell around campus, burning tar barrels and shooting pistols into the air.
Matthew Pearl
#31. 'The Dante Club' was one of America's most important book clubs, as their Wednesday night meetings ultimately led to our country's first exposure to Dante's poetry on a wide scale.
Matthew Pearl
#32. I prefer the society of one faithful person to an association of rapid talkers, who more than anything else seek admiration from one another.
Matthew Pearl
#33. What they don't realize is that sequels are bound to disappoint those who have waited for them.
Matthew Pearl
#34. One important idea I hope is reflected in 'The Poe Shadow' is that fiction can add as much to history as nonfiction does.
Matthew Pearl
#35. 'Pity without rigor would be cowardly egotism, mere sentimentality.'
Matthew Pearl
#36. Why did nature not ask my advice about my features?
Matthew Pearl
#37. It is my conviction that we make ourselves who we want to be and not chain ourselves to the notions of busybodies who wish to judge us.
Matthew Pearl
#38. We never like the smell of our own vices in other people, Holmes. Ah, let's steer here for a drink or two," Lowell suggested.
Matthew Pearl
#39. Shakespeare brings us to know ourselves. Dante, with his dissection of all others, bids us to know one another.
Matthew Pearl
#40. What's the use of having eyes if we can't see the world we pass through?
Matthew Pearl
#41. How odd it must be to go through life believing that a book is a book.
Matthew Pearl
#42. 'Yes, we rather condemn people for eternity without the courtesy of informing them.'
Matthew Pearl
#43. I still have my high school copy of the collected Poe - missing its covers and pretty worse for the wear.
Matthew Pearl
#44. When they dreamed of turning iron and metal into gold, they called it alchemy. The much more far-fetched dream of turning bound sheafs of plain paper into fortunes, they call publishing.
Matthew Pearl
#45. What's most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights.
Matthew Pearl
#46. Avoid the Holy Grail, the heroic journeys, the pursuit of a legend
that is not the life of the bookaneer, who must keep his eyes on the ground while other book people live by dreaming.
Matthew Pearl
#47. Edgar Allan Poe, an earlier UVA student, once complained in a letter that his stepfather spoke to him as if Poe were one of the black slaves; some of the students at UVA surely felt the same about being told what to do by faculty.
Matthew Pearl
#48. Unlike New York or Chicago, once you were inside Boston, any point in the city was fairly convenient to any other.
Matthew Pearl
#49. Only a few pages into "The Technologists" and Matthew Pearl already has written a gem about Boston:
"Then would come the view of the stretches of docks and piers ... then beyond that the State House's gold dome capping the horizon - the glittering cranium of the world's smartest city.
Matthew Pearl
#50. [Benjamin Franklin]. Not only one of our nation's founding geniuses but a printer and publisher, too ... He knew that to form the soul of America, one must control the presses.
Matthew Pearl
#51. I was fortunate that Yale has a very open and creative law school. I took many courses outside the law school, and every semester, the students had a literature reading group. I was asked to lead one on 'Dante and the Concept of Justice,' and it was around that time that I began writing the novel.
Matthew Pearl
#52. On the trees were no longer only leaves but brown fruits, on the bushes no longer blossoms but clusters of red berries. And the wind had a rough manliness in its voice - the tone not of a lover but of a husband.
Matthew Pearl
#53. Every scientific truth goes through three stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Second, they say it has been discovered before. Last, they say they always believed it.
Matthew Pearl
#54. A man's library opens up his character to the world.
Matthew Pearl
#55. Poe was plagued and haunted most of all by something pretty banal: poverty. Probably the most eccentric decision in life was to become a writer in an age when making a living at it was nearly impossible.
Matthew Pearl
#56. When Charles Dickens arrived in Boston Harbor, where he started, they had to keep it secret because there was such a mob of people expecting him, and they actually chased down his carriage at the hotel, the Parker House Hotel.
Matthew Pearl
#57. I never fully realized how much a New England birth in itself was worth, but I am happy that that was my lot. I have felt it so keenly these last few days. Dear old New England, with all her sternness and uncompromising opinions; the home of all that is good and noble.
Matthew Pearl
#58. Though a woman tempted man to eat, my dear Longfellow," said Holmes, "you never hear of Eve having to do with his drinking, for he took to that of his own notion.
Matthew Pearl
#59. Money is good, but it is not all about a man. You will have successes and reversals, but remember it is your reaction to each of them that counts for your character.
Matthew Pearl
#60. One thing I incorporated in my novel 'The Poe Shadow' was the little-known fact that documents show Poe inherited a slave and decided to free him.
Matthew Pearl
#61. Before long, I had lost my youth and my patience for indulging others. Books were everything in life; books were better than wine.
Matthew Pearl
#62. Strangers talking over piles of books do not remain strangers for long.
Matthew Pearl
#63. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, film has been a shadow thrown over the minds of all novelists. Ever since, novelists have strained to make themselves more relevant and, whether consciously or not, novel-writing has been influenced by cinematic doctrines - by turns, embracing and defying it.
Matthew Pearl
#64. It is not when a man is at the end of his life, but when a man is at the end of his profession, that his soul shows itself.
Matthew Pearl
#65. He worshipped at the temple of her intellect and I believe it was a comfort to him to know that she left our world with it still shining.
Matthew Pearl
#66. If we think about what mystery entails as a genre, certainly a big part of it is a resolution.
Matthew Pearl
#67. Romance is not an idea, but a moment. An unspoken glance when someone looks into your eyes and knows exactly who you are, what you need.
Matthew Pearl
#68. You are always better off to read a book, anyway, than to meet the person behind it.
Matthew Pearl
#69. The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time.
Matthew Pearl
#70. Up until the final decade of the nineteenth century, the United States and the United Kingdom did not recognize copyright in each other's creative works.
Matthew Pearl
#71. 'Do not ask what brings Dante to man but what brings man to Dante-to personally enter his sphere, though it is forever severe and unforgiving.'
Matthew Pearl
#72. And luckily I have enough in my head to balance what is wanting in my back.
Matthew Pearl
#73. He was outwardly calm but inwardly bleeding to death.
Matthew Pearl
#74. I had a dog named Oliver with severe separation anxiety. He couldn't be alone ... so I had to bring him wherever I went.
Matthew Pearl
#75. Exaggeration is the octopus of the English language
Matthew Pearl
#76. As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens's era will be recreated in some way.
Matthew Pearl
#78. The same thing as you, the same as she. The same as anyone who has ever been doubted or told to go away. To prove myself better.
Matthew Pearl
#79. I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.
Matthew Pearl
#80. The intense media coverage of today's campus shootings presents a double edged sword. On the one hand, it gives us a chance to think about and reflect on the causes; on the other hand, in a very small minority of unstable minds, the repeated telling of the stories can be interpreted as glamorous.
Matthew Pearl
#81. That bookshops will one day disappear altogether and be replaced by mail order, that eventually books themselves would be finally and fully buried by that awful foe, so much cheaper and easier to carry: newspapers.
Matthew Pearl
#82. Survival here means simply an incomplete death, not a partial life
to be trapped in a gap between the living and the dead. If I had a thousand tongues, I would not try to describe the agony!
Matthew Pearl
#83. When you ask one friend to dine, give him your best wine. When you ask two, the second best will do.
Matthew Pearl
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