Literature is the question minus the answer. — Roland Barthes
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. — Juan Ramon Jimenez
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. — Fernando Pessoa
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. — Iris Murdoch
England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare,but the Bible made England. — Victor Hugo
Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness. — F. R. Leavis
An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books. — Malcolm X
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas! — D. H. Lawrence
Literature has the power to change lives, minds, and hearts. — Cam'ron
Don’t learn literature from a history teacher. — Vijay Kedia
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. — Ezra Pound
Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers. — Carlos Fuentes
A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can. — Edith Hamilton
English Poetry Quotes
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano. — Gordon Getty
Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca. — W. S. Merwin
I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes. You do get writer's block when you're writing music, and having inspiration from other great writers is great. You have to look for inspiration because sometimes music isn't the only thing that you can look at. — Taylor Momsen
Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.
When it came to a lot of these German actors with the English, they just couldn't do it. They couldn't get the poetry out of it. They couldn't own it and make it their own. And then Christoph [Waltz] came in, and I didn't know who Christoph was. — Quentin Tarantino
I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene. — Peter Porter
I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman. — Robert Graves
It seems to me that once if your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.
I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published. — Sally Kirkland
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English. — Robert Morgan
The truest and greatest Poetry, (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough) can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion. — Walt Whitman
When I'm writing poetry, 99.9% of my writing begins in English. I spent most of my life in English, although I am bilingual. — Pat Mora
American Literature Quotes
While Americans have heard of Darfur and think we should be doing more there, they aren't actually angry at the president about inaction — Nicholas D. Kristof
I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of. — Dashiell Hammett
I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. — Leslie Marmon Silko
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
All that happens is that the destruction of human beings - unless they're Americans - is called collateral damage. — Harold Pinter
The American soldier is quick in adapting himself to a new mode of living. Outfits which have been here only three days have dug vast networks of ditches three feet deep in the bare brown earth. They have rigged up a light here and there with a storage battery. — Ernie Pyle
I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers. — Diane Wakoski
Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites...some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way. — Tony Kushner
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. — Ernest Hemingway
Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead. — Sinclair Lewis
French Literature Quotes
It has since been agreed that speeches given in English will be translated into French and vice versa, and even into German and Italian when necessary. No doubt translations into Esperanto will also soon be in demand. — Fredrik Bajer
What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature. — W. Somerset Maugham
My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature, I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish. — Fran Lebowitz
I read world literature and I read French romances in the originals. I had quite a profound knowledge - no, that sounds conceited, but I did have a profound interest in everything spiritual. — Baldur von Schirach
In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert? — Manuel Puig
How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question. — Lytton Strachey
The amateur is very rare in French literature - as rare as he is common in our own. — Lytton Strachey
In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature. — Patrick White
Twitter reminds me of an era in French literature - Emile Zola and Honoré de Balzac - and the beginning of modernity and gossip. They had these fashion magazines of the time on display with all of the Emile Zola references. — Kim Gordon
Many Europeans think that all Moroccans speak French, but no. I had to make an effort to learn it when I studied French literature at the university in Rabat. — Abdellah Taia
English History Quotes
Many people do not know that Jesus did not speak Latin or English or Hebrew; he spoke Aramaic. But nobody knows that language. So we're talking about the Bible itself being a translation of a translation of a translation. And, in reality, it has affected people's lives in history. — Ngugi wa Thiong'o
English language is the most universal language in history, way more than the Latin of Julius Caesar. Its the most punderful language because its vocabulary has a certain critical mass that makes a lingo good for punning. — Richard Lederer
The principle of free speech is no new doctrine born of the Constitution of the United States. It is a heritage of English-speaking peoples, which has been won by incalculable sacrifice, and which they must preserve so long as they hope to live as free men. — Robert M. La Follette, Sr.
Just heard Paul Scholes has retired, best I’ve ever played against by a mile. Most technically gifted player in english history. Legend. — Joey Barton
English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background. — David Crystal
Although the Irish language is connected with the many recollections that twine around the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication, is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual decline of the Irish language. — Daniel O'Connell
In reviewing the history of the English Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander, not blinded by prejudice nor warped by interest, would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes. — Thomas Paine
Today, for the first time in history, a Bishop of Rome sets foot on English soil. This fair land, once a distant outpost of the pagan world, has become, through the preaching of the Gospel, a beloved and gifted portion of Christ's vineyard. — Pope John Paul II
Yes, they broke the law, but we can't deport them. Let's get over this pointing fingers and do something about that, whether it - they have to pay a fine, learn to speak English, the history, you can do that. And then you have to give visas for the skills we need. — Michael Bloomberg
The more you look back into English history, the more you are forced to the conclusion that alongside civility and the deeply held convictions about individual rights, the English have a natural taste for disorder. — Anna Pavlova
Modern Literature Quotes
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent. — Henry David Thoreau
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
Attention-deficit disorders seem to abound in modern society, and we don't know the cause. — Marilyn vos Savant
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial. — Henry David Thoreau
Perversity is the muse of modern literature. — Susan Sontag
Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled. — Barbara Tuchman
Magic Realism is not new. The label's new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it's been around as long as literature has been around. — Terri Windling
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
Modern American literature was born in protest, born in rebellion, born out of the sense of loss and indirection which was imposed upon the new generations out of the realization that the old formal culture-the "New England idea"-could no longer serve. — Alfred Kazin
Literature History Quotes
I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature. — Muhammad Iqbal
How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions? — Polly Toynbee
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is. — David McCullough
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. — Barbara Tuchman
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. — George Saintsbury
In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations. — Anne Bogart
True education does not consist merely in the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but in the development of character. — David O. Mckay
It’s not rocket science. It’s social science – the science of understanding people’s needs and their unique relationship with art, literature, history, music, work, philosophy, community, technology and psychology. The act of design is structuring and creating that balance. — Clement Mok
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. — Henry James
In schoolbooks and in literature we can separate ecclesiastical and political history; in the life of mankind they are intertwined. — Leopold Von Ranke
Great Literature Quotes
We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement. — B. F. Skinner
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. — Leo Tolstoy
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth. — Edward Dahlberg
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
As I passed along the side walls of Westminster Abbey, I hardly saw any thing but marble monuments of great admirals, but which were all too much loaded with finery and ornaments, to make on me at least, the intended impression. — Karl Philipp Moritz
Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions. — A. E. Housman
Every great political campaign rewrites the rules; devising a new way to win is what gives campaigns a comparative advantage against their foes. — John Podhoretz
First of all, the Jewish religion has a great deal in common with the Christian religion because, as Rabbi Gillman points out in the show, Christianity is based on Judaism. Christ was Jewish. — Barbara Walters
Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature. — Ravi Shankar
Although spoken English doesn't obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn't know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage. — Marilyn vos Savant
English Education Quotes
Education should foster; this education is meant to repress. Education should inspire; this education is meant to tame. Education should harden; this education is meant to enervate. The English are too wise a people to attempt to educate the Irish in any worthy sense. As well expect them to arm us. — Patrick Pearse
Anyone who keeps learning stays young. — Henry Ford
You have to be a whole, dignified, self-respecting person in order to be an English teacher or whatever kind of job your education would prepare you for, and I just knew that segregation was wrong, and I knew that I should not be going along with it. That I should resist it. — Diane Nash
Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn — Albert Einstein
Anyone who stops learning is old — whether this happens at twenty or at eighty. Anyone who keeps on learning not only remains young but becomes constantly more valuable — regardless of physical capacity. — Henry Ford
English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street. — E. B. White
Good English, well spoken and well written will open more doors than a college degree... Bad English will slam doors you don't even know exist. — William Raspberry
Freedom is for the educated people who fought for it. We were slaves of the English, now we will be slaves of the educated Indians—or the Pakistanis. — Khushwant Singh
All the youth now in England of free men, who are rich enough to be able to devote themselves to it, be set to learn as long as they are not fit for any other occupation, until they are able to read English writing well. — Alfred the Great
World Literature Quotes
When we no longer have good cooking in the world, we will have no literature, nor high and sharp intelligence, nor friendly gatherings, no social harmony. — Marie-Antoine Careme
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. — Aldous Huxley
It is my earnest hope, and indeed the hope of all mankind, that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past... — Douglas MacArthur
Literature provides us with the opportunity to escape into fictional worlds that are ultimately rooted in human universals shaped by common biological forces. — Gad Saad
Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you. — Roald Dahl
I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large. — Kenzaburo Oe
The power of literature to foster empathy is one of the most important ways in which it contributes to our understanding of the world. — Martha C. Nussbaum
So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world. — E. O. Wilson
English Writing Quotes
I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. — Mark Twain
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. — Ernest Hemingway
I am an English major in school with an emphasis in creative writing. I think hearing Maya Angelou speak at school last year was one of the best moments Stanford, at least, intellectually, had to offer. — Fred Savage
We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it. — P. D. James
Write. Don't talk about writing. Don't tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don't give me a bunch of "somedays." Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all, it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English. — Glen Cook
I cannot write in English, because of the treacherous spelling. When I am reading, I only hear it and am unable to remember what the written word looks like. — Albert Einstein
You never know what's going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book, she would never have believed that. So you can never say never. — Tony Dungy
We all know the old expression, "I'll work my thoughts out on paper." There's something about the pen that focuses the brain in a way that nothing else does. That is why we must have more writing in the schools, more writing in all subjects, not just in English classes. — David McCullough
Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me. — David Guterson
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar. — E. B. White
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
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
The Irishman in English literature may be said to have been born with an apology in his mouth. — James Connolly
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
I'm into books – I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round. — Taron Egerton
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 conscientous student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning. — Northrop Frye
I studied English Literature. I wasn’t a very good student, but one thing I did get from it, while I was making films at the same time with the college film society, was that I started thinking about the narrative freedoms that authors had enjoyed for centuries and it seemed to me that filmmakers should enjoy those freedoms as well. — Christopher Nolan
Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people. — Virginia Woolf
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
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
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
Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it. — Robert Hass
Develop an Interest in Life as you see it. — Henry Miller
The Bible contains some of the most sublime passages in English literature, but is also full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and absurdities. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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
There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives. — David Brin
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
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
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility. — Wallace Stevens
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
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
It is curious for one who studies the action and reaction of national literature on each other, to see the humor of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be, to the English mind. — James Russell Lowell
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
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
I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn't a religion major really. — Maggie Gyllenhaal
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
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
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
Literature belongs first and foremost to the language in which it is being written. The very same book, even if it is translated very accurately, let's say from Hebrew into English or from English into Hebrew, becomes a different book because language is a musical instrument. — Amos Oz
I didn't see many female politicians on TV. I didn't see women in history textbooks, so I did geography, and art and English literature. But I know I must have been affected by not seeing women represented. — Emma Watson
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
Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you read, you are limiting yourself. You need to get a good overall sense of English literary history, so you can write out of that knowledge. — Theodora Goss
We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature. — Jorge Luis Borges
The great British Library -- one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or pure English, undefiled wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought. — Washington Irving
Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New England, and of English literature generally, as of another order. He is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald, the poet-seer. — John Burroughs
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
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
I'd studied English literature and American history, but the English literature, which I thought was going to be helpful to me in an immediate way, was the opposite. So I had to un-think a lot of things and move out of my own head, and I learned a lot. It was like graduate school, but an un-graduate school or an un-school. — Lynne Tillman
I've been acting for years and years, at prep school - school plays, that kind of thing. That was always very high on my agenda. 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
I like to take things as they come and, as much as possible, not force anything. I think I could wind up somewhere completely different five years from now, something completely removed from acting - I could be perfectly content studying photography or English literature. At the same time, I love what I'm doing right now and could see doing this for a very long time. — Hayden Christensen
There are reviews that are clearly wrong. Dr. Johnson's famous Life of Savage, he's clearly wrong about the value of Savage. But it's one of the great works in English literature. You can learn more about the artistic expression and what the poet does and how to write about art from that than any number of guys who are terrible writers, who have no original ideas, but who say yes, "Hamlet" is a wonderful play. It's a meaningless statement. — Gary Giddins
I think acting came later in life when I went to college. I started out there. I wasn't a big star in the school plays or anything. I guess I just really liked stories. I was an English-literature major, and that's all about stories and narratives. Film and theater are very powerful storytelling mediums. You sit in a dark room and enter another world. I love that as a member of the audience, and I sort of wanted to get on the other side. — Rachel Weisz
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