Top 100 Quotes About English Literature
#1. I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times.
Jo Walton
#2. People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!
Mary Gordon
#3. I give pleasure to you. Do not interfere..." #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion
Olga Goa
#4. I graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with an English literature degree and travelled for a year before going to work.
Natalie Massenet
#5. '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
#6. I loved English literature - if didn't it would have been hard - but I had to learn it myself. I remembered ways to repeat words, to put more emphasis on certain lines.
Benjamin Clementine
#7. I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: the most conscientious student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.
Northrop Frye
#8. And 'tis a kind of good deed to say well:
And yet words are no deeds.
King Henry VIII. Act 3, Scene 2
William Shakespeare
#9. I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.
Pat Conroy
#10. 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
#12. as the descendants of the Normans finally amalgamated with the English natives, the Anglo-Saxon language reasserted itself; but in its poverty it had to borrow hundreds of French words (literary, intellectual, and cultural) before it could become the language of literature.
Richard A. LaFleur
#13. The course of English Literature would have been decidedly different had Mr. Wordsworth owned a power mower, she thought.
Harper Lee
#14. I went to study English for two reasons. Principally because when I was in university, studying drama wasn't considered an option. You couldn't get a degree course for it. And so many plays and things that I was interested in landed themselves in a broader spectrum of literature.
James Callis
#15. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.
Pat Conroy
#16. Frieda, you despise English music. You know you do. And English art. And English literature, except Shakespeare, and he's a German.
E. M. Forster
#17. English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.
Lytton Strachey
#19. I left school at 16 but I wish I'd gone to university - I think I would have studied English literature. I had a knack for that. But I don't think you have the kind of wisdom at 16 to make that decision.
Brendan Coyle
#20. While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
Cyril Connolly (English critic and editor, 1903-1974)
Cyril Connolly
#21. I often think that eventually I'd love to do some papers ... my correspondence if life calms down a bit, but I think I'd do history or English literature ... I've had enough of journos.
Brooke Fraser
#22. With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.
Mark Haddon
#23. If circumstances should make it impossible (temporarily, I hope) for me to be a Russian writer, perhaps I shall be able, like the Pole Joseph Conrad, to become for a time an English writer ... ("Letter To Stalin")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#24. Now why should that man have fainted? But he did,and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#25. The wise words of a friend and guide rang in my head. 'How would you distinguish a true servant of God from a traitor? ... You should take especial notice of how a person speaks, not of other things, but of God.
Harry Blamires
#26. When I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I was nevertheless outside the language I was speaking, building simple sentences with the blocks I'd memorized, not communicating through a fluid medium.
Ben Lerner
#27. School was rough for me. I was a good student in middle school, but high school wasn't so fun. I still pulled through, though! I excelled in art, fashion, history and English literature - anything creative. Math and science I struggled a bit more in.
India De Beaufort
#28. My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.
Frederik Pohl
#29. Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W.S. Merwin
#30. I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.
Lafcadio Hearn
#31. I went to graduate school with zero expectation. I kind of backed into it. I wanted to go back to school because I felt gaps in my literary background. I studied mostly twentieth-century English literature in college, so I thought, 'Maybe I'll go back for my writing.'
Susan Minot
#32. In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar.
Trevor Nunn
#33. I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.
John Donne
#34. The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.
Michael Eric Dyson
#35. My mother's father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay's 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I'd be Horatius keeping the bridge.
Bernie Taupin
#36. I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.
Pat Conroy
#38. I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.
Eileen Myles
#39. I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and ... ants. I can understand ants.
A.S. Byatt
#40. The central symbol for Canada-and this based on numerous instances of its occurrence in both English and French Canadian literature-is undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance.
Margaret Atwood
#41. 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
#42. You are like the winged goddess from Greek mythology. As beautiful and soaring like an angel as her". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion:
Olga Goa
#43. Despite centuries of English literature, the most famous split infinitive in all of history comes from Star Trek.
R. Curtis Venture
#44. At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes.
Wilbur Smith
#45. Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths.
Jonathan Stroud
#46. I wish more Italian literature were translated and read in English. I've discovered so many extraordinary and diverse writers: Lalla Romano, Carlo Cassola. Beppe Fenoglio, Giorgio Manganelli, just to name a few.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#47. I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
Philip Pullman
#48. In my opinion, Fiction is a figment of our imagination & it causes us to dream but Reality taints dreams, and the F.scott Fitzgerald has clearly depicted this in The Great Gatsby.
Parul Wadhwa
#50. If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English Literature's performing flea.
Sean O'Casey
#51. There's a history of English literature where the best boils to the top, and Jane Austen stands right at the top of that.
JJ Feild
#52. I'm kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother's a children's librarian, and all of the children's literature I read was from her childhood - E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn't children's literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literature. I thought I was of that world.
Jefferson Mays
#53. I cannot perceive that you're still a girl. Ur kisses don't seem so innocent. They just drive me crazy!" #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion
Olga Goa
#54. English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.
Marilyn Butler
#55. Oh! And they read English novels! David! Did you ever look into an English novel? Well, do not trouble yourself. It is nothing but a lot of nonsense about girls with fanciful names getting married.
Susanna Clarke
#56. I am especially indebted to a 10th grade English teacher who encouraged me to read great works of literature.
Samuel Alito
#57. As a student in England, I studied French and English literature. I read L'Etranger and the rhythm of the novel felt familiar to me - very African.
Sefi Atta
#58. I was an English-literature major, and that's all about stories and narratives.
Rachel Weisz
#59. There's always a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.
Dylan Moran
#60. It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature.
John Drinkwater
#61. It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.
Lafcadio Hearn
#62. I fell even more deeply in love with Tolkien's legendarium after studying Old English literature at uni, as I got a sense of the historical events and cultures that Tolkien used to create his world. My favourite of his imaginary locations is Lothlorien.
Samantha Shannon
#63. Although I think the word "pleasure" is unknown to you. More precisely, its practical meaning". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion
Olga Goa
#64. 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
#65. I love literature, the English language and storytelling. I also have thirty horses and seventy foxhounds to feed.
Rita Mae Brown
#66. Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Henry James
#67. Had I not gone to Japan in 1986, had I stayed home and majored in English literature as I'd intended to do, I might indeed have become an investment banker, an outcome that perhaps would have proved a more severe blow to the health of the U.S. economy than to the history of the novel.
John Burnham Schwartz
#68. I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I'd go looking for the England of English Literature, and he nodded and said: 'It's there.'
Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. Looking around the rug one thing's for sure: it's here.
Helene Hanff
#69. English has a better way with colloquialisms. It has colloquialisms that are colorful and expressive but not too heavy or distracting. In German, if you use colloquialisms, it quickly descends into some kind of dialect literature.
Daniel Kehlmann
#70. Bad is the world, and all will come to naught
when such ill-dealing must be seen in thought.
William Shakespeare
#71. Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.
Robert Graves
#72. Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace Stevens
#74. I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.
J.G. Ballard
#75. The time is ripe for young Indian authors writing in the English language.
Anurag Shourie
#77. For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.
Lafcadio Hearn
#78. I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.
Kurt Vonnegut
#79. I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.
Stephen Fry
#80. It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.
Rebecca West
#81. I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#82. 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
#83. The Bible contains some of the most sublime passages in English literature, but is also full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and absurdities.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#84. I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.
Daniel Suarez
#85. But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before.
John Edward Williams
#86. You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.
Richard Dawkins
#87. Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back.
Stephen Burt
#88. Language is the key to the heart of people.
Ahmed Deedat
#89. For what it's worth, in my experience astronomers are more likely than biologists to be believers. But several surveys, more scientific than my anecdotal experiences, have confirmed that in academic settings, the real atheists are to be found in English Literature departments.
Guy Consolmagno
#90. I study English literature but my friends are doing psychology and things like that. No one cares about acting there. It's not competitive and it's a nice environment for me.
Yasmin Paige
#91. But this is exactly why I read
and don't belong to a book group
because reading is the most individual thing there is. Why collectivize it? Didn't we have enough bad English teachers in school? Crowd sourcing and literature shouldn't mix.
Peter Orner
#92. At graduation, I assumed I'd be in publishing, but first I went to England and got a master's degree in English Literature. And then I came back to New York and had a series of publishing jobs, the way one does.
Joseph Kanon
#93. I feel a bit of an imposter talking about the science. I'm not a scientist, you may be aware. I read English Literature.
James Delingpole
#94. But why," he said with animation, "do the English not read their own great literature?"
Victor laughed triumphantly, and said, "Because at school they are made to hate it.
Olaf Stapledon
#95. Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.
Melissa Bank
#96. I went to University College London and read English literature, then realised if you were interested in story and narrative, film was the way to go.
Alison Owen
#97. She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#98. In the nights though, I couldn't help but weave the golden cloth of my dreams. Each stitch from heart to thought, and thought to heart, was painful to bear, even if it was joyous at times. Because each thread was fraught with the fears of being broken midway, lost and never found again.
Nida
Faiqa Mansab
#99. As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#100. The Irishman in English literature may be said to have been born with an apology in his mouth.
James Connolly
