Top 34 Literature Classics Quotes
#1. So pathetic," he said, with a grunt. "So sad. Such a cliche. You can be so fond of cinema, of world literature, the classics, but then, when you find yourself playing out a classic scene, you don't feel ennobled, linked to that greatness. You feel...pathetic.
David Cronenberg
#2. Poirot, watching him, felt suddenly a doubt
an uncomfortable twinge. Was there, here, something that he had missed? Some richness of the spirit? Sadness crept over him. Yes, he should have become acquainted with the classics. Long ago. Now, alas, it was too late ...
Agatha Christie
#3. Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.
Edward Abbey
#4. I've never met anyone as kind as you are, except me Mum, o' course." --Benjamin Trimmel to Lady Alexandra.
Lisa M. Prysock
#5. Countless words
count less
than the silent balance
between yin and yang
Lao-Tzu
#6. A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
Italo Calvino
#7. I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.
Alan Bennett
#8. I always find that after reading books written by Jane Austen that I speak much more properly, at least for a while.
Becky Watson
#9. They [Narnia] are, perhaps, the greatest classics of children's literature of the twentieth century.
Douglas Gresham
#10. The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but thet are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought
Bernard Bailyn
#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. Classics aren't books that are read for pleasure. Classics are books that are imposed on unwilling students, books that are subjected to analyses of "levels of significance" and other blatt, books that are dead.
Alexei Panshin
#13. In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.
Amy Lowell
#14. I was really exposed to great old-time literature - the classics, the poetic realists like Strindberg and Ibsen and all those guys. I was really inspired by all those guys. That's when writing became a primary focus.
Kurt Sutter
#15. While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#16. All is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most ... .
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#18. So does a whole world, with all of its greatness and littleness, lie in a twinkling star.
Charles Dickens
#19. Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new-create another heir
As great in admiration as herself.
William Shakespeare
#20. And what does a person with such romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics?
If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective, I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.
Donna Tartt
#21. Anger was buried far too early in a young heart, which perhaps contained much good.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#22. I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.
John Green
#23. I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more.
Robert Stone
#24. But she forgot nothing, and he sometimes forgot much too quickly, and, often that same day, encouraged by her composure, would laugh and frolic over the champagne, if friends stopped by. What venom must have been in her eyes at those moments yet he noticed nothing!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#25. Read the great books, gentlemen," Mr. Monte said one day. "Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There's not enough time.
Pat Conroy
#26. It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#27. Hell, everybody is a masochist. Some of us are just a little more private.
Cecil Brown
#28. Might it have been nothing but life itself? Life; this limitless complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens.
Yukio Mishima
#29. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.
Helen Keller
#30. But I hate to hear you talking so like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days.
Jane Austen
#31. I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.
Vladimir Putin
#32. Time, which sees all things, has found you out.
Sophocles
#33. I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers.
David Mitchell
#34. It is the best way to write poetry, letting things come. -Winnie-the-Pooh
A.A. Milne
