Top 100 Quotes About English Literature
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#6. The course of English Literature would have been decidedly different had Mr. Wordsworth owned a power mower, she thought.
Harper Lee
#7. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and ... ants. I can understand ants.
A.S. Byatt
#18. Despite centuries of English literature, the most famous split infinitive in all of history comes from Star Trek.
R. Curtis Venture
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. I was an English-literature major, and that's all about stories and narratives.
Rachel Weisz
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. The Bible contains some of the most sublime passages in English literature, but is also full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and absurdities.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#38. 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
#39. But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before.
John Edward Williams
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. The Irishman in English literature may be said to have been born with an apology in his mouth.
James Connolly
#47. When I entered college, it was to study liberal arts. At the University of Pennsylvania, I studied English literature, but I fell in love with broadcasting, with telling stories about other people's exploits.
Andrea Mitchell
#48. I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.
Jorge Luis Borges
#49. Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
Russell Baker
#50. I think in general there's no point in going into a field like English literature if you're not going to have fun with it.
Louis Menand
#51. English literature is a glorious inheritance which is open to all - there are no barriers, no coupons, and no restrictions. In the English language and in its great writers there are great riches and treasures, of which, of course, the Bible and Shakespeare stand along on the highest platform.
Winston Churchill
#52. I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn't a religion major really.
Maggie Gyllenhaal
#53. [ ... ] and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds.
Vladimir Nabokov
#54. I've loved 'Vanity Fair' since I was 16 years old. You know, we're all colonial hangovers in India, steeped in English literature. It is one of these novels that I read under the covers at my convent boarding school in Simla.
Mira Nair
#55. Teaching English literature would have seemed to us like teaching a hungry man the way to his mouth when he had a feast before him. Almost
Albert Jay Nock
#56. I wanted to write plays. I was at Yale graduate school at the time for English literature, not for acting ... I liked the idea of collaboration, and I thought if I'm gonna write plays, I should learn something about speaking the lines that I might try to write.
David Duchovny
#57. I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.
Chiwetel Ejiofor
#58. 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
#59. Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.
Glen Duncan
#60. My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.
Margaret Atwood
#61. I will find you another long-forgotten Queen Mab poem in no time. Depend on it. I refuse to let Cody or anyone else know more about English Literature than me. So calm yourself, Elfish, and let an expert take over.
Martin Millar
#62. First time my master's in English literature ever proved useful.
Anne Rice
#63. The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell.
Henry David Thoreau
#64. I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times.
Jo Walton
#65. I give pleasure to you. Do not interfere..." #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion
Olga Goa
#66. '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
#67. 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
#68. I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.
Pat Conroy
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W.S. Merwin
#81. I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.
John Donne
#82. 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
#83. I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.
Pat Conroy
#85. I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.
Eileen Myles
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. You are like the winged goddess from Greek mythology. As beautiful and soaring like an angel as her". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion:
Olga Goa
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. I am especially indebted to a 10th grade English teacher who encouraged me to read great works of literature.
Samuel Alito
#98. 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
#99. Although I think the word "pleasure" is unknown to you. More precisely, its practical meaning". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion
Olga Goa
#100. 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
