Education Literature Reading Quotes

The only time when you and I really entered into literature, entered the kingdom of letters, was when each of us sat as a child absorbed in the magic pages of a book: in some snug corner of a quiet room or sheltered in some lost recess of the seashore with the muffled sound of the wind and sea to concentrate our thought - that is reading, that is literature. ~ Stephen Leacock

The very best authors are no longer with us; so only read books written by dead people. ~ Kevin Ansbro

He did. He researched her. Someone told him that she had a special interest in John Milton. It did not take long to discover the century to which this man belonged. A third-year literature student in Beard's college who owed him a favor (for procuring tickets to a Cream concert) gave him an hour on Milton, what to read, what to think. He read "Comus" and was astounded by its silliness. He read through "Lycidas," "Samson Agonistes," and "Il Penseroso" - stilted and rather prissy in parts, he thought. He fared better with "Paradise Lost" and, like many before him, preferred Satan's party to God's. He, Beard, that is, memorized passages that appeared to him intelligent and especially sonorous. He read a biography, and four essays that he had been told were pivotal. The reading took him one long week. He came close to being thrown out of an antiquarian bookshop in the Turl when he casually asked for a first edition of "Paradise Lost." He tracked down a kindly tutor who knew about buying old books and confided to him that he wanted to impress a girl with a certain kind of present, and was directed to a bookshop in Covent Garden where he spent half a term's money on an eighteenth-century edition of "Areopagitica." When he speed-read it on the train back to Oxford, one of the pages cracked in two. He repaired it with Sellotape. ~ Ian McEwan

George is a goblin who looks like a young boy. He is explaining to his friend Lout, an ogre, that he's really older than he seems - - -

"My people grow slowly and I've been around longer than you think. I'm very mature for my age. I have a doctorate degree from Oxford in Medieval Literature," said George.

"Is Oxford really in this story?" asked Lout.

"I should have said Oxxphord."

"That sounds better. I'm really impressed, George. With an education like that, you could get a great job."

"Yeah, that's how I ended up as a stable boy. ~ Bob Craton

I don't know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit. ~ Pat Conroy

We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development - part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern" - has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so - and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few - have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author. ~ James Shapiro

But living amid so many words, I overestimated their power and breadth. The world does not turn on words alone; it only seems to if the eye and mind are saturated with them. ~ Lynne Sharon Schwartz

It is possible that the malice of writers has been overrated (by myself among others). Reading their ruminations on their craft, one sees why this writer could not possibly like that one, would indeed consider him a menace. Literature is a battleground of conflicting faiths, and nobler passions than envy are involved. ~ Wilfrid Sheed

With a slow wink, he set the book in Tamaqua's hands. "One of my favorites. ~ C.J. Milbrandt

During his reading hours, which were between one and five o'clock in the morning, but not every morning, he had come to the disconcerting conclusion that whistling was not an important theme in literature. ~ Julio Cortazar

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first? ~ Giorgos Seferis

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. ~ Gaston Bachelard

Literature is language charged with meaning ~ Ezra Pound

Life was so short, and books so countlessly many. ~ Aldous Huxley

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it. ~ Alexander Theroux

We have so politicized literature today, pigeonholing people into gay male fiction, lesbian fiction, transgender fiction and then other sub-genres within those. There seems to be a feeling like authors should stay in their own box and not write about anybody else, but the thing is, as a writer, you're constantly writing about things that you yourself haven't personally experienced. We should all be free to write about each other as human beings. Some gay men love reading lesbian novels, some straight women love gay male romance, and that richness of reaching across the boundaries helps us further our understanding of each other. ~ Patricia Nell Warren

Education does not define you as a "HUMAN BEING" your actions does. ~ Henry Johnson Jr

Much that is great in literature is an acquired taste, and you have to acquire it in the first place. Our job as parents is essentially to pass on the enthusiasm we had for the things we loved. That's how we'll get them to fall in love with reading in the first place and, hopefully, to stay in love with it. ~ Michael Morpurgo

I remember thinking that people were crazy for reading the same book more than once, but I now have a new-found appreciation for the re-discovery of literature. The lessons we learned from books in the school curriculum are reinvented and updated when we read as adults. ~ Rachel Nichols

I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across the millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility. ~ Marilynne Robinson

Sex education is legitimate in that girls cannot be taught soon enough how children don't come into the world. ~ Karl Kraus

I've worn Niki's pants for two days now. I thought a third day in the same clothes might be pushing it."

Ian shrugged with indifference. "It might send Derian through the roof, but it doesn't bother me. Wear what you want to wear."

Eena wrinkled her nose at him. "Do you really feel that way or are you trying to appear more laissez-faire than Derian?"

"More laissez-faire?"

"Yes. That's a real word."

"Two words actually," he grinned. "Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui même!" He coated the words with a heavy French accent. Eena gawked at him.

"Since when do you speak French?"

"I don't." Ian chuckled. "But I did do some research in world history the year I followed you around on Earth. Physics was a joke, but history - that I found fascinating."

Slapping a hand against her chest, Eena exclaimed, "I can't believe it! Unbeknownst to me, Ian actually studied something in high school other than the library's collection of sci-fi paperbacks!"

He grimaced at her exaggerated performance before defending his preferred choice of reading material. "Hey, popular literature is a valuable and enlightening form of world history. You would know that if you read a book or two."

She ignored his reproach and asked with curiosity, "What exactly did you say?"

"In French?"

"Duh, yes."

"Don't 'duh' me, you could easily have been referring to ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

A little while ago I was able to wander in a beautiful sublime fantasy world, in Ossian's half-dark magical world. But the blessed dreams dissolve; they seem like love potions - they intoxicate, exalt and then disappear, that is the misery and wretchedness of all our feelings. With thoughts it is no better: one easily overthinks things to the point of staleness. ~ Karoline Von Günderrode

Newspaper readership is declining like crazy. In fact, there's a good chance that nobody is reading my column. ~ Dave Barry

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present. ~ Ross Macdonald

I always find that after reading books written by Jane Austen that I speak much more properly, at least for a while. ~ Becky Watson

My heart was burning for home. For a moment I felt like crying out, but at the moment of greater pain my mother's voice came back to me. It was as if she was here and talking, Stay and take an education, boy. Take it in, That's the main thing. ~ Michael Anthony

While they read these stories, moreover - and this is a comforting thought for those who believe that the best way for anyone to become a lover of real literature is to be exposed to it early and often - boys and girls are not only gratifying their love for a
stirring tale, they are making the acquaintance of the great story-tellers of the past, taking them into their lives as companions. This early contact gives children an experience which will keep their horizon in after life from being entirely circumscribed by the mediocre and ephemeral. If a boy has sailed the wine dark Aegean, or climbed a height whence he could watch Roland's last heroic stand in the Pass of Roncevaux, some gleam remains, and there is far less likelihood that his adult reading will be entirely commonplace. ~ Anne Thaxter Eaton

They teach us that in school, matters of principle. I swear it's a plot to get us all slaughtered the day they graduate us out the door. It's their revenge, see? Here we are reading books in literature class about some banana who's only got one oar in the water to start with, and then he pops it out worrying about principles. ~ Guy Vanderhaeghe

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

THIS SHOP IS HAUNTED by the ghosts
Of all great literature, in hosts;
We sell no fakes or trashes.
Lovers of books are welcome here,
No clerks will babble in your ear,
Please smoke
but don't drop ashes!
Browse as long as you like.
Prices of all books plainly marked.
If you want to ask questions, you'll find the proprietor
where the tobacco smoke is thickest.
We pay cash for books.
We have what you want, though you may not know you want it.
Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing.
Let us prescribe for you.
By R. & H. MIFFLIN, ~ Christopher Morley

But what I hope for in a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer. ~ Anne Tyler

There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature. ~ Stephen R. Covey

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration. ~ Allan Bloom

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose. ~ Margaret Atwood

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers. ~ Thomas Jefferson

If he let one day pass without glancing at a single page, habit led him to feel a vague sense of decay. Therefore, in the face of most intrusions, he tried to arrange it so that he could stay in touch with the printed word. There were moments when he felt that books constituted his only legitimate province. ~ Soseki Natsume

Many of the greatest books are like a forest. The best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost. ~ Anthony Esolen

Kessler depicts his developing intimacy with a handful of dairy goats and offers an enviable glimpse of the pastoral good life. Yet he also cautions, "Wherever the notion of paradise exists, so does the idea that it was lost. Paradise is always in the past." The title Goat Song is a literal rendering of the Greek word traghoudhia, tragedy. Reading it, I was reminded of Leo Marx's analysis of Thoreau's Walden. In The Machine in the Garden, Marx names Thoreau a tragic, if complex pastoralist. After failing to make an agrarian living raising beans for commercial trade (although his intent was always more allegorical than pecuniary), Thoreau ends Walden by replacing the pastoral idea where it originated: in literature. Paradise, Marx concludes, is not ultimately to be found at Walden Pond; it is to be found in the pages of Walden. ~ Heather Paxson

Mary Stewart will always be my goddess. I can pick up one of her early books - one I've read a dozen times - and still slide right into the story. ~ Nora Roberts

What makes Geoffrey Chaucer such compelling reading is his creation of a riveting conversation between the ideal and the everyday. ~ John Mark Reynolds

I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course – I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the Midwest to Leechfield, then spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother's front porch reading Homer (or Ovid or Virgil) and waiting for someone to ask me what I was reading. No one ever did. People asked me what I was drinking, how much I weighed, where I was living, and if I had married yet, but no one gave me a chance to deliver my lecture on Great Literature. ~ Mary Karr