Matthew Pearl Quotes

Strangers talking over piles of books do not remain strangers for long.

What's most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights.

A man was leaning idly against an elm ... The man, who towered over the poet even at his slanting angle, too old for a student and too worn for a faculty member, stared at him with the familiar, insatiable gleam of the literary admirer.

Dante's Hell is part of our world as much as part of the underworld, and shouldn't be avoided, Lowell said, but rather confronted. We sound the depths of Hell very often in this life.

...It is the one time Dante calls such explicit attention to the idea of contrapasso-a word for which we have no exact translation, no precise definition in English, because the word in itself is its definition... Well, my dear Longfellow, I would say countersuffering ... the notion that each sinner must be punished by continuing the damage of his own sin against him... just as these Schismatics are cut apart...

When they dreamed of turning iron and metal into gold, they called it alchemy. The much more far-fetched dream of turning bound sheafs of plain paper into fortunes, they call publishing.

Every scientific truth goes through three stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Second, they say it has been discovered before. Last, they say they always believed it.

They always blamed my reading, you know, for my having fewer friends than my brother and for my weak eyes, never thinking that because I had weak eyes and because I was shy, having a book at the ready rescued me.

These writers take the essence of every person around them, turn them into books and stories without permission or even a simple thank-you, and want all the credit and glory for themselves.

What's the use of having eyes if we can't see the world we pass through?

Imagine! It is the real power of a book
not what is on the page, but what happens when a reader takes the pages in, makes it part of himself. That is the definition of literature.

When Charles Dickens arrived in Boston Harbor, where he started, they had to keep it secret because there was such a mob of people expecting him, and they actually chased down his carriage at the hotel, the Parker House Hotel.

Avoid the Holy Grail, the heroic journeys, the pursuit of a legend
that is not the life of the bookaneer, who must keep his eyes on the ground while other book people live by dreaming.

'Yes, we rather condemn people for eternity without the courtesy of informing them.'

Surprisingly, it was not an American but a British company that opened an amusement park in 2007 called Dickens World, located in the English county of Kent, complete with an Ebenezer Scrooge Haunted House, a Great Expectations Boat Ride and the as-advertised 'costumed Dickensian characters.'

Beware the camel's nose - for its whole body will soon follow.

Surprises, like misfortunes, seldom come alone.

Shakespeare brings us to know ourselves. Dante, with his dissection of all others, bids us to know one another.

When I ply the cutlass and make the equivalent of sixpence, idiot conscience applauds me. But if I sit in the house and make twenty pounds by writing, idiot conscience wails over my neglect and the day wasted. No, to come down covered with mud and drenched with sweat and rain after some hours in the bush. To change, rub down, and take a chair in the verandah, that makes for a quiet conscience.

I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants.

How odd it must be to go through life believing that a book is a book.

Remember that there are two things in this life that are never worth crying about: what can be cured and what cannot be cured.

Teacher, tender comrade, wife,
A fellow farer true through life,
Heart whole and soul free,
The August father gave to me.

Romance is not an idea, but a moment. An unspoken glance when someone looks into your eyes and knows exactly who you are, what you need.

People hate the idea of politicians, you see, but love the idea of authors, at least until they meet one.

I love writing shorter fiction.

Now, on his way to another lecture, the very thought of entering a room full of students, who still thought it was possible to learn all about something, made him yawn.

Edgar Allan Poe, an earlier UVA student, once complained in a letter that his stepfather spoke to him as if Poe were one of the black slaves; some of the students at UVA surely felt the same about being told what to do by faculty.

I was looking for something else in books. I could not really say what, but I think I can say why: a notion started in my own brain was probably wrong, but an answer read in a work of literature would be right. That was my conviction at nineteen, and only in later years would I come to trust myself over a book.

My high school English teacher in junior year, Dr. Robert Parsons, assigned us some Poe stories, including 'The Black Cat' and 'The Purloined Letter.' Being an animal person, I had trouble with 'The Black Cat!' I got hooked instead by 'The Purloined Letter,' a Poe story with detective C. Auguste Dupin.

If we think about what mystery entails as a genre, certainly a big part of it is a resolution.

Stevenson threw back his head and made a slow murmuring sound, "If only I could secure a violent death."
"Pardon?"
"What a fine success!" Stevenson continued, spurring Jack into a canter as he lost himself in his thoughts. "I wish to die in my boots, you see, Mr. Porter. To be drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from this horse into a ditch, Mr. Fergins
aye, to be hanged, rather than pass through the slow dissolution of illnesses!

The same thing as you, the same as she. The same as anyone who has ever been doubted or told to go away. To prove myself better.

'Do not ask what brings Dante to man but what brings man to Dante-to personally enter his sphere, though it is forever severe and unforgiving.'

The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time.

The book I'm working on next, which will be my fifth, returns to literary history. I really do love literary history, and I have plenty more ideas on it.

I do not seek the mantle of genius. I am an appreciator, an observer, a preposition, and content in that, and that's me in a nutshell.

That bookshops will one day disappear altogether and be replaced by mail order, that eventually books themselves would be finally and fully buried by that awful foe, so much cheaper and easier to carry: newspapers.

Believe that when I am at once a man's friend I am always so-nor is it so very hard to bring me to it. And though a man may enjoy himself in being my enemy, he cannot make me HIS for longer than I wish. Good afternoon." Lowell had a way of leaving a conversation with the other person needing more from him.

Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, film has been a shadow thrown over the minds of all novelists. Ever since, novelists have strained to make themselves more relevant and, whether consciously or not, novel-writing has been influenced by cinematic doctrines - by turns, embracing and defying it.

believes the world is against him. Nothing

And luckily I have enough in my head to balance what is wanting in my back.

Porter Square Books was the only place I could find that was dog-friendly, work-friendly, and had food. I was there all the time.

You are always better off to read a book, anyway, than to meet the person behind it.

In fact, the laboratory may be the greatest friend to dumb animals. As science advances, the lives of animals will improve as we depend less and less on their labor and no longer ignore their conditions in order to improve ours. You know, there is much to learn from animals if we are ever to be truly industrial creatures. The beaver is the finest builder of bridges and the silkworm a better weaver than any man or woman. God gave industry perfectly to the caterpillar while we must learn our arts. That is technology--our way to become closer to being like animals.

The force of Dante's poetry resonated most in those who did not confess the Catholic faith, for believers would inevitably have quibbles with Dante's theology. But for those most distant theologically, Dante's faith was so perfect, so unyielding, that a reader found himself compelled by the poetry to take it all to heart.

A man's library opens up his character to the world.

Dickens's final book, 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood,' forms the jumping-off point for my new novel, 'The Last Dickens'. This last work by Dickens has very little social commentary and a pretty tightly efficient storyline and cast of characters. Not necessarily what we think of when we think what characterizes Dickens.

Survival here means simply an incomplete death, not a partial life
to be trapped in a gap between the living and the dead. If I had a thousand tongues, I would not try to describe the agony!

'The Dante Club' was one of America's most important book clubs, as their Wednesday night meetings ultimately led to our country's first exposure to Dante's poetry on a wide scale.

Though an angel should write, still 'tis devils must print

Unlike New York or Chicago, once you were inside Boston, any point in the city was fairly convenient to any other.

When Dickens arrives in the United States in November of 1867, he's already in questionable health. So by the end of the trip, he was really in failing condition, and really, he would never recover completely after this point, and you could sort of draw a straight line to his ultimate decline and death.

As a writer of historical fiction, I believe you don't want to fictionalize gratuitously; you want the fictional aspects to prod and pressure the history into new and exciting reactions.

Books inspire a man to embrace the world or flee it. They start wars and end them. They make the men and women who write and publish them vast fortunes, and nearly as quickly can drive them into madness and despair. Stay away from what you do not fathom from now on ...

The intense media coverage of today's campus shootings presents a double edged sword. On the one hand, it gives us a chance to think about and reflect on the causes; on the other hand, in a very small minority of unstable minds, the repeated telling of the stories can be interpreted as glamorous.

It is my conviction that we make ourselves who we want to be and not chain ourselves to the notions of busybodies who wish to judge us.

As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens's era will be recreated in some way.

Why did nature not ask my advice about my features?

Before long, I had lost my youth and my patience for indulging others. Books were everything in life; books were better than wine.

One important idea I hope is reflected in 'The Poe Shadow' is that fiction can add as much to history as nonfiction does.

Exaggeration is the octopus of the English language

No, never mind, I didn't think so. Mead, Dante's theme is man-not a man.' Lowell said finally with a mild patience that he reserved only for students. "The Italians forever twitch at Dante's sleeves trying to make him say he is of their politics and their way of thinking. Their way indeed! To confine it to Florence or Italy is to banish it from the sympathies of mankind. We read Paradise Lost as a poem but Dante's Comedy as a chronicle of our inner lives. Do you boys know of Isaiah 38:10

He worshipped at the temple of her intellect and I believe it was a comfort to him to know that she left our world with it still shining.

I had a dog named Oliver with severe separation anxiety. He couldn't be alone ... so I had to bring him wherever I went.

[Benjamin Franklin]. Not only one of our nation's founding geniuses but a printer and publisher, too ... He knew that to form the soul of America, one must control the presses.

Milton was the gold standard of religious poets for English and American scholars. But Milton wrote of Hell and Heaven from above and below, respectively, not from the inside: safer advantages.

Recall that when the first presses produced copies of the Bible, the scribes who had to spend years at a time on the same work, just as it had been done for centuries, streamed out from the monasteries with quills raised in the air, decrying the work of the devil. When one of the pioneering tradesmen printed certain words in red ink to emphasize them, it was proof that he had used his own blood. That was why the printers' assistants began to be called "devils." Soon printers were threatened with burning, and some were indeed put into the fire along with their equipment. From the beginning, the creation of the modern book was viewed as the work of Satan - an attempt to usurp the word of God.