Skip to main content

English Lit Quotes

indirect speech and irony eventually made Austen one of the most influential and honored novelists in English Literature. Source: Wikipedia
- Jane Austen

I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that.
- Joan Collins

Men may congratulate themselves for writing truly and passionately about the movements of nations; they may consider war and the search for God to be great literature's only subjects; but if men's standing in the world could be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed.
- Michael Cunningham

Where's your sketch pad?" I asked.
... "I gave that up," Kay said. "I wasn't very good, so I changed my major."
"To what?"
"To pre-med, then psychology, then English lit, then history."
"I like a woman who knows what she wants."
Kay smiled. "So do I, but I don't know any.
- James Ellroy

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

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

Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature.
- Henry Louis Gates

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

I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn't a religion major really.
- Maggie Gyllenhaal

But I don't know, maybe it's just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look at the streets. 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.
- Helene Hanff

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

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

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

Ninety-nine per cent of traditional English literature concerns people who never have to worry about money at all. We always seem to be watching or reading about emotional crises among folk who live in a world of great fortune both in matters of luck and money; stories and fantasies about rock stars and film stars, sporting millionaires and models; jet-setting members of the aristocracy and international financiers.
- James Kelman

Despite his first, the study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlor game, and reading books and having opinions about them, the desirable adjunct to a civilized existence. But it was not the core, whatever Dr. Leavis said in his lectures.
- Ian Mcewan

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

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

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

School is disappointing. If science is exciting and art is exhilarating, the schools and universities have achieved the not inconsiderable feat of rendering both dull. As every scientist and poet knows, one discovers both vocations in spite of, not because of school. It takes years to recover from the stupor of being taught Shakespeare in English Lit and Wheatstone's bridge in Physics.
- Walker Percy

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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fat Person Quotes

She was convinced that she was anorexic, because every time she looked in the mirror she did indeed see a fat person. - Terry Pratchett I sensed immediately that he'd once been overweight. He moved with a fat person's tiptoey apology. - Jennifer Egan I feel self-conscious calling my cat fat in front of a fat person, considering I'm skinny and inconsiderate. - Jarod Kintz I call myself a FFP: former fat person, and when you're an FFP, you will always see in yourself what people used to bully you for. - Kelly Osbourne Well you know, it's true that as a fat person I run a greater risk of heart disease, diabetes, and a number of other things. But guess what? The amount of that risk is almost infinitessimal! - Daniel Pinkwater

Bass Player Quotes

I always just wanted to be the singer or the bass player in the band. I'd love to have a band, where I was obviously the singer, but where it wasn't me, it wasn't my name. - Bryan Adams In jazz, you listen to what the bass player is doing and what the drummer is doing, what the pianist and the guitarist is doing, and then you play something that compliments that, so you are thinking simultaneously and thinking ahead. - David Amram I can understand why some of these drummers and bass players become cult figures with all of their equipment and the incredible amount of technique they have. But there's very little that I think satisfies you intellectually or emotionally. - Ken Burns Jack Bruce, as soon as I saw him, it changed me. I didn't even know what bass players did until I saw Cream. - Geezer Butler Bass players are always the intellectual kind, but nobody knows it. - Stanley Clarke There are a lot of people who can do it on the guitar and sing at the same t...