English Lit Quotes

It seems only fair," Matthew continued. "A bit of karma, if you will." He twirled the stake again. "Shall we see how long you scream?"
"Are you ever going to shut up?" I snapped, fear and irritation filling me in equal measures. "This isn't your monologue, Hamlet. It's the battle scene, in case you've forgotten."
His eyes narrowed so fast they nearly sparked. They were the color of honey on fire. One of the others growled like an animal, low in his throat. It made all the hairs on my arms stand straight up.
I was going to die for making fun of Shakespeare.
My English Lit professor would be so proud. ~ Alyxandra Harvey

Even though I loved to write, I never liked English lit. class very much. I think it ruins books when you dissect them too much. I liked my art classes best. ~ Meg Cabot

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

I did my BA in English lit, and hated the restriction - I'd always read more in translation than not; coming from a working-class background, what I knew of as British literature - the writers who made big prize lists and/or were stocked in WH Smith, Doncaster's only bookshop until I was 17 - seemed incredibly, alienatingly middle-class. Then in 2009, just after the financial crash, I graduated with no more specific skill than 'can analyse a bit of poetry'. ~ Deborah Smith

Civilization - a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

Once I found her sitting straight up at the dining room table with her eyes half open, staring at nothing. When I touched her shoulder, she didn't even look at me. In spite of all this, or maybe because of it, I always smiled and said hi to her in the halls. I helped her with her English Lit homework and practically did her PowerPoint presentation on the New York Stock Exchange on the morning that it was due. Even so, whenever she saw me coming, she always looked away, like she knew how much crap people gave me about it - not my real friends; I'm talking about world-class losers like Dean Whittaker and Shep Monroe, rich jerks whose Fortune 500 dads swam the icy seas of international finance looking for their next meal. None of that bothered me. ~ Joe Schreiber

This is an evening of wonders, indeed! ~ Jane Austen

I think, for me, there's The Book I Should Write and The Book I Wanted to Write - and they weren't the same book. The Book I Should Write should be realistic, since I studied English Lit. It should be cultural. It should reflect where I am today. The Book I Wanted to Write would probably include flying women, magic, and all of that. ~ Marlon James

The young specialist in English Lit, ... lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. ~ Isaac Asimov

We have the same symptoms as tuberculosis, especially in the eyes of the Romantic Poets. Pale, tired, coughing up blood."
"That's romantic?"
I had to smile. "Romantic with a capital 'R.' You know, like Byron and Coleridge."
He gave a mock shudder. "Please, stop. I barely passed English Lit."
I snorted. "I didn't have that option. One of my aunts took Byron as a lover."
"Get out."
"Seriously. It makes Lucy insanely jealous."
"That girl is . . ."
"My best friend," I filled in sternly.
"I was only going to say she's unique. ~ Alyxandra Harvey

At this point I feel I would be remiss to not mention the prevalence of a specific kind of person who enters the field of book publishing. This is the English lit major who never should have left academia, a genius who has read all of V.S. Naipaul but can't photocopy title pages right side up. This person is very thin, possibly vegan, probably Ivy League. He or she feels as if answering the phone in a chipper voice is a form of legalized prostitution. He or she has a single quirky fashion piece, usually red or black, and waxes poetic about typewriters and the British, having never truly known either. Regardless of sex, they all want to be David Foster Wallace when they grow up. ~ Sloane Crosley

She nodded and smiled, but I could feel that she was slightly disappointed in me. Like Ms Parker when I answer every question in English with 'It's a metaphor for desire. ~ Chloe Seager

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

Her sense of style was juvenile and horrid, and the back of her hand was still inked with a cherry blossom tree she'd drawn in English Lit, so why the fuck was she still hot as shit?
Didn't matter. I hated her anyway.
But her apparent devotion to trying not to be sexy, paired with the fact that she actually was sexy, always made me hard as stone. ~ L.J. Shen

Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight. ~ Camille Paglia

But I have so little of any of these things! You are wise and powerful. Will you not take the Ring?"
"No!" cried Gandalf, springing to his feet. "With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly." His eyes flashed and his face was lit as by a fire within. "Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength. I shall have such need of it. Great perils lie before me. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

The Chicago literary tradition is born not out of its Universities, but out of the sports desk and the city desk of its newspapers. Hemingway revolutionized English prose. His inspiration was the telegraph, whose use, at Western Union, taught this: every word costs something,
This, of course, is the essence of poetry, which is the essence of great prose. Chicagoan literature came from the newspaper, whose purpose, in those days, was to Tell What Happened. Hemingway's epiphany was reported, earlier, by Keats as " 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' --that is all ye know earth, and all ye need to know." I would add to Keats' summation only this: "Don't let the other fellow piss on your back and tell you it's raining."
I believe one might theoretically forgive one who cheats at business, but never one who cheats at cards; for business adversaries operate at arm's length, the cardplayer under the strict rules of the game, period.
That was my first political epiphany.
And now, I have written a political book.
What are the qualifications for a Political Writer?
They are, I believe, the same as those of an aspiring critic: an inability to write for the Sports Page. ~ David Mamet

I thought of us lying down on some grassy patch of SeaWorld together, me on my back and she on her side with her arm draped against me, her head on my shoulder, facing me. Not doing anything - just lying there together beneath the sky, the night here so well lit that it drowns out the stars. ~ John Green

evening, they began to think that although he could never hope to be an Englishman, still it would be hard to visit that affliction on his head. They began to accommodate themselves to his level, calling him 'Mr Baptist,' but treating him like a baby, and laughing immoderately at his lively gestures and his childish English - more, ~ Charles Dickens

I should warn you: this is an ambrosia den, and there'll be peculiars in there who are lit out of their minds. Don't talk to them, and whatever you do, don't look them in the eye. I know people who've been blinded that way. ~ Ransom Riggs

One of the maxims which the devil, in a late visit upon earth, left to his disciples, is, when once you are got up, to kick the stool from under you. In plain English, when you have made your fortune by the good offices of a friend, you are advised to discard him as soon as you can. ~ Henry Fielding

I do not intend to give you any homework - no difficult math questions, or anything like that, and conjugating English verbs is outside my sphere of interest. However, from time to time I'll give you a short assignment. ~ Jostein Gaarder

I believe I'm very conscious of exactly what I'm doing. I'm auditioning lines of dialogue, and I'm interrogating whether the lines would translate from Russian into English the right way. The English that results can perhaps seem somewhat more formal than colloquial, but not so formal as to feel academic. ~ David Bezmozgis

Mongkol, poor Mongkol, shedding tears.

Thinking of his smiling, comical face, and his dreams of sending his son to university, I could only lower my head in silence.

And the night continued, cold and dark, the wind frozen beyond the mountains. ~ You Jin

Take the very word "etiquette." From the French for "little signs," it also connotes "social rules" both in French and in English. In fact, the two meanings share a history. King Louis XIV of France needed to give his nobles a bit of help behaving properly at his palace at Versailles, so little signs were posted telling them what was what - social dos and don'ts for dummies, so to speak. ~ Daniel Post Senning

Takes more than beer in your blood to take the English out of you. ~ Nancy Holder

Other approaches to studying language, and there are many, go by names like poetics, philology, and rhetoric, but as long as we have had the word in English, linguistics has been associated with the methods, goals, and results of science.1 When William Whewell (who is also responsible for the coinage, scientist) first proposed the term, it was in his History of the Inductive Sciences (1837.1:cxiv; he was borrowing it from the Germans, who, Teutonically
enough, later came to prefer Sprachwissenschaft). ~ Randy Allen Harris

Coaches have got to be given rank within the university so that you can't fire a coach unless you go through an academic committee, just as you would with a professor. If coaches are to have any stability and security, they need to be treated like an English professor. ~ Joe Paterno

I lit fire
And found my way out
Of the darkness
That you created! ~ Jyoti Patel

George walked into the room and looked at each of us in turn, ending with Thierry.
"Hey, boss," he said as he lit a cigarette and exhaled the smoke out slowly, "did Sarah really call you an asshole before"?
"George!" I moaned. "Now? You habe to bring that up now?"
"Is this a bad time?" He didn't wait for an answer, or for the matter, a response to his first question. " I just figured that since I haven't heard any shooting in here, this might be a good time for me to take off. ~ Michelle Rowen

It's hard for me to speak, whether in English or Afrikaans. The reason I write is because I cannot speak. I feel blunt. ~ Antjie Krog

I feel like I'm losing my ability to understand reality; like when someone loses their hearing, they can still speak English, but their speech eventually becomes distorted because they can't hear themselves. ~ David Chang

And again. I kept clicking until the photograph was demolished, until it was no more than a mosaic of gray tiles, adding up to nothing.
Nothing. Because wasn't that how I felt that day? If you zoom close - if you really get close to someone, if you really get close to yourself - then you
lose the other person, you lose yourself entirely. You get so close you can't see anything anymore. Your mind becomes all these abstract fragments.
English becomes math. ~ David Levithan

Mac noticed her body's reaction. Even in the dimly lit room, she saw his pupils dilate. And when he licked his lips, those deceivingly sift lips? Well it took everything she had to shimmy up his body like an electric worker shimmies up a pole. ~ Julie Ann Walker

But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence. ~ Alberto Manguel

It is certainly very hard to write about sex in English without making it unattractive. ~ Edmund Wilson

I'm bilingual. I speak English and I speak educationese. ~ Shirley Hufstedler

My parents spent countless hours teaching me to read and write. My mother was an English teacher who patiently taught me where to put my periods and commas, and my father, who loves books more than anyone I know, taught me from an early age that books are precious and should be handled gently , "like butterflies. ~ Jessi Klein

The Strip was still lit by a million neon lights, though the crowds on the sidewalk had greatly decreased by this hour. Still, Bosch was awed by the spectacle of light. In every imaginable color and configuration, it was a megawatt funnel of enticement to greed that burned twenty-four hours a day. Bosch felt the same attraction that all the other grinders felt tug at them. Las Vegas was like one of the hookers on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Even happily married men at least glanced their way, if only for a second, just to get an idea what was out there, maybe give them something to think about. Las Vegas was like that. There was a visceral attraction here. The bold promise of money and sex. But the first was a broken promise, a mirage, and the second was fraught with danger, expense, physical and mental risk. It was where the real gambling took place in this town. ~ Michael Connelly

The basic skills of math, English and writing are not enough, ... You must develop a basic system of values to form and guide the use of these skills. The true test will not be what you learned in college, but how you used what you learned. ~ Jim Rogers

I spoke English at school and Spanish at home, and I'm always eating Dominican food, listening to Dominican music. ~ Prince Royce

Wuz.' They spelled it 'wuz.' 'Wuz'! I'm in AP English! I read a lot! I read big books. Big f***ing books! I read Tolstoy, and Faulkner, and - 'wuz'? ~ Brittany Cavallaro

Sounds like a jolly good adventure – rather frightening too, I must say. Fortunate that I was tootling past, say what? Come now, you must be in a bit of a fix. Why don't you hop aboard and I'll take you back to Lucille in a jiffy and we'll have a cuppa and a meeting of the old grey matter, what!"

Donald shuffled next to Ralph's side. Out of the corner of his mouth, he whispered: "What's he saying? ~ Ness Kingsley

The four sweetest words in the English language - 'You wore me down.' ~ Aziz Ansari

She was in the middle of a city [Nominally a city. It was the size of an English county town, or, translated into American terms, a shopping mall.] at the time. ~ Terry Pratchett

Twice in one day?" I asked. "And how'd you even get up here?"
He flashed his easy smile. "Someone put a lit match in one of the bathroom's garbage cans. Damn shame. The staff's kind of busy. Come on, I'm springing you."
I shook my head. Setting fires was apparently a new sign of affection. Christian had done it and now Mason. ~ Richelle Mead

There is a struggle inside you between these two parts. It's as if at times your heart becomes a battlefield! The secret part, full of light, seems so small and weak in the face of the discouraging and morbid part, which seems enormous and overwhelming. However, if you light a small candle in a dark room, everything is lit up. It is a matter of trusting in this little light in the deepest part of your being which can gradually chase away the darkness. ~ Jean Vanier

It is a well-known fact that English people never know anything. They only think. The only exception they know and they are sure about in the whole world is Marmite. 'Love it or hate it.' There are no other options; there is no space for grey space. ~ Angela Kiss