English Professor Quotes

#1. Mom," said Peter, "nobody thinks you're a lackwit, if that's what you're worried about."
Lackwit? In what musty drawer of some dead English professor's dust-covered desk did you find that word? I assure you that never in my worst nightmares did I ever suppose that I was a lackwit.

Orson Scott Card

#2. Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.

Dean Wesley Smith

#3. As a former English professor, I can assure you that grammar is the qualitative interpolation of language. Adjectives, pronouns, predicates, past pluperfect indicative - ridiculous. It has qualities, shadings, differentiations, rhythmic structures of symbolic meaning.

Frederick Lenz

#4. I have three brothers and one sister, and I'm the third child. Sometimes people say, 'It's only natural you would become a writer - your parents were English professors.' But my four siblings were brought up in the exact same household, and no one else became a writer or an English professor.

Antonya Nelson

#5. I trained as a writer before I became a lawyer. I was headed for a life as an English professor, but that just wasn't me. I'm not a scholar; I didn't have a scholar's attitude toward literature.

Scott Turow

#6. It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

Kurt Vonnegut

#7. I discovered Orson Welles in college; my freshman English professor screened 'Citizen Kane' for us, and I wound up writing a 20-page term paper on it.

Claire Danes

#8. We all laced together - a brothel madam, an English professor, a mute cook, a quadroon cabbie, and me, the girl carrying a bucket of lies and throwing them like confetti.

Ruta Sepetys

#9. I'm still an English professor at Rice University here in Houston. They've been very generous in letting me on a very long leash to just work on 'The Passage' and its sequels.

Justin Cronin

#10. My dad was an English professor.

Blake Lively

#11. It was always important to me to be that kid who could rock the party as well as rock the English professor's mind.

Saul Williams

#12. Coaches have got to be given rank within the university so that you can't fire a coach unless you go through an academic committee, just as you would with a professor. If coaches are to have any stability and security, they need to be treated like an English professor.

Joe Paterno

#13. Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?

Richard Russo

#14. My freshman English professor at Kent State University in 1984 told me I was a good writer, and she loved all the silly pictures I drew in my notebook. She said I should try writing children's books, and so I did.

Dav Pilkey

#15. I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.

William Safire

#16. My mother - both my mother and father had very successful careers. My mother's an English professor and my father is a scientist and physician. They worked at the same jobs for their entire life, 50 years each

David Plotz

#17. In the holy solipsism
of the young
Now I can't walk thru a city
street w/out eying each
single pedestrian. I feel
thier vibe thru my
skin, the hair on my neck
it rises.

Jim Morrison

#18. Professor Henry Higgins: There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years!

Alan Jay Lerner

#19. Professor Cirksena, the only person within five hundred miles who knew anything about the history of English magic. Her former Ph.D. professor in psychology looked up from his work, and smiled. "Come in, my dear.

Karla Tipton

#20. There's a worldwide linking of environmental activists, developmental experts and human rights advocates. And they're using the two frameworks, in particular environmental standards and human rights.

Mary Robinson

#21. The saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humor.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar

#22. Nowadays you don't go around on the street kicking people, punching people
because if you do (makes gun shape with hand), well that's it
I don't care how good you are.

Bruce Lee

#23. The celebrated Parisian doctor Professor Xavier Bichat developed a fully materialist theory of the human body and mind in his lectures Physiological Researches on Life and Death, translated into English in 1816. Bichat defined life bleakly as 'the sum of the functions by which death is resisted

Richard Holmes

#24. My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.

Eric Allin Cornell

#25. I just remembered songs my grandmother taught me, and songs that I learned for the recordings. But, then I learned to speak Italian. When I was there, I hired a professor who stayed with me 24 hours a day. She wouldn't let me speak a word of English.

Connie Francis

#26. Is the professor who insists we read Ernest Hemingway again instead of Gertrude Stein "obsessing"? Because although I did a BA in English, an MFA in Poetry, and a year's worth of a PhD, Stein was an author I had to discover on my own. She wasn't on the syllabus anywhere in all that time.

Laura Mullen

#27. Professors of classics - not even a professor of English - professors of classics, they're something sacred; it's almost like being a priest.

Erich Segal

#28. You spend all this time, as a child, coming up with these fantasy stories, and here I am, sleeping in a treehouse, in the middle of Canyon de Chelly, shooting a Western. That's a bit of a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

James Badge Dale

#29. Stephen King is open about the fact that he continues to learn the craft, and if King hasn't got it figured out yet, what the hell hope have the rest of us got?

Marcus Sakey

#30. In a talk at a recent Phi Beta Kappa meeting, Duke University professor Katherine Hayles confessed, "I can't get my students to read whole books anymore."10 Hayles teaches English; the students she's talking about are students of literature.

Nicholas Carr

#31. It is almost possible to measure a writer's skill by the dexterity with which he repeats, and yet avoids monotony.

George G. Williams

#32. AT first Raoden stayed away from the library, because it reminded him of her.
Then he found himself drawn back to it - because it reminded him of her.

Brandon Sanderson

#33. Until the June 1967 war I was completely caught up in the life of a young professor of English. Beginning in 1968, I started to think, write, and travel as someone who felt himself to be directly involved in the renaissance of Palestinian life and politics.

Edward Said

#34. One of my goals as a professor of English is to teach students to recognize and think critically about what makes something art.

Andrew Hoberek

#35. The way I enjoyed spending time most was dancing. That's from the time I was a very small child, When I was 4 or 5 years old, I remember already having a regime. It was the way I always identified myself.

Twyla Tharp

#36. The rejection of sabotage in the metropole, based on the argument that it would be better to take things over instead of destroying them, is based on the dictum: The people of the Third World should wait for their revolution until the masses in the metropole catch up.

Red Army Faction

#37. The biggest mistake we make in creating successful relationships is that we seek to experience who we are through others rather than allowing others to experience who they are through us.

Neale Donald Walsch

#38. 'Jane Eyre,' when I think of that book, it conjures up the best moments of college English courses. Literature is extraordinary, especially when you have a good professor.

Edward P. Jones