Class Literature Quotes

#1. I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature.

Sherman Alexie

#2. She wondered which would be worse -- to belong to the group assigned to lifelong drudgery, or to be on the other side, thinking you deserved everything the universe by sheer good luck had tossed in your lap, never realizing your whole life was based on lies.

Jo Victor

#3. I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

Per Petterson

#4. We were supposed to be an English literature class, but Miss Nesbitt used literature to teach real life. She said she didn't have time to teach us like a regular English teacher
we were too far behind. Instead, she taught us the world through literature.

Phillip M. Hoose

#5. Too often students are being taught to read as if literature were some kind of ethics class or civics class - or worse, some kind of self-help manual. In fact, the important thing is the way the writer uses the language.

Francine Prose

#6. Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#7. Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.

Aldous Huxley

#8. I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.

Nic Pizzolatto

#9. I was always drawn to teachers who made class interesting. In high school, I enjoyed my American and English literature classes because my teachers, Jeanne Dorsey and Dani Barton, created an environment where interaction was important.

Ellen Ochoa

#10. If you can't really have a conversation with someone candidly about it it's something that you'll always have something to learn from when it comes to taking a literature class.

Elizabeth Olsen

#11. The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Stephen Leacock

#12. A very small class of books have nothing in common say that each admits us to a world of its own that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it, but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him.

Philip Zaleski

#13. They didn't teach Nietzsche in the philosophy department at Harvard; philosophy there was strictly analytical stuff and the poetic ramblings of Nietzsche did not belong. And see - you are teaching it in a literature class - so they must have been right.

Dean Wareham

#14. I didn't know much about Texas when I moved there for graduate school. In my first or second semester, I took a class in life and literature of the Southwest, and that's where I first heard about these events along the border in 1915-1918, what Anglos called the Bandit Wars.

Philipp Meyer

#15. The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#16. I think the class divide is going to change. I think a lot more working class people are going to get published. It is really class ridden, literature.

Denise Mina

#17. Literature has her quacks no less than medicine, and they are divided into two classes; those who have erudition without genius, and those who have volubility without depth; we shall get second-hand sense from the one, and original nonsense from the other.

Charles Caleb Colton

#18. The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.

Alan Bennett

#19. For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class - contemporary literature is what's most useful.

Alan Lightman

#20. So much of the literature we had to read for high school English class was filled with victimized, tragic, symbolic women who spurred the plot forward with their inevitable shunning/death/shunning-followed-by-pregnancy-followed-by-death timelines.

Libba Bray

#21. I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.

Anthony Marra

#22. It's literature that provides solace to hearts wounded by man made divisions of religion, race, class, gender and class...

Neelam Saxena Chandra

#23. Poetry and visions, springing as they do from an ever-present sense of mortality, might easily appear morbid to the sturdy
common sense of a burgher-class in the making.

Hope Mirrlees

#24. At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.

Soledad O'Brien

#25. Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.

Annie Dillard

#26. He would wordlessly light up his pungent antiasthma cigarettes in the middle of class and debate openly with his mathematics and literature teachers about inaccuracies he's caught them in.

Jon Lee Anderson

#27. Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.

William Styron