Class Books Quotes & Sayings

There has appeared in our time a particular class of books and articles which I sincerely and solemnly think may be called the silliest ever known among men ... these things are about nothing; they are about what is called Success. On every bookstall, in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed. They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books. To begin with, of course, there is no such thing as Success. Or, if you like to put it so, there is nothing that is not successful. That a thing is successful merely means that it is; a millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a donkey in being a donkey ... I really think that the people who buy these books (if any people do buy them) have a moral, if not a legal, right to ask for their money back. — G.K. Chesterton

The most critical of these new religious developments for twentieth-century religious liberalism were a renewed and transformed emphasis on mystical practice and experience, the healing ministry known as mind cure, and the rise of modern psychology. These three interrelated spiritual innovations spread as significant components of popular religion in large part through the mass print media. Rather than religious movements dependent on revivalism or church life, these were first and foremost discourses, creatures of the printed word. Initially explored only by an avant-garde of liberal intellectuals late in the nineteenth century, the new books and ideas emerging at the margins of liberal Protestantism eventually reached a nation-wide middle-class audience. The mass media unleashed by nineteenth-century evangelicalism enabled the alternative spiritualities of the twentieth century to flourish, especially with the rise of religious middlebrow culture in the decades after World War I. — Matthew Hedstrom

One could get a first-class education from a shelf of books five feet long. — Charles William Eliot

Some people have read a few Marxist books and think themselves quite learned but what they have read has not penetrated, has not struck root in their minds, so that they do not know how to use it and their class feelings remain as of old. Others are very conceited and having learned some book-phrases, think them terrific and are very cocky; but whenever a storm blows up, they take a stand very different from that of the workers and the majority of the peasants. They waver while the latter stand firm, they equivocate while the latter are forthright. — Mao Zedong

I had thrived in Miss Popham's class because she was in charge of her own curriculum. She had a wonderful idea and freedom to teach as she wished. I still think hers is the best way to organize a literature class in high school if the goal is to encourage wide reading and the love of books. My own best teaching in high school reflected my attempts to replicate the spirit of that 1943 class — James Gray

Athletes, we were supposed to just be there, and in class I made it a point that I was prepared for every exam, that I got on that Dean's List. Because I wanted them to see that there was a black person on the Dean's List who was an athlete. I accepted the challenge, because I want you to know that we bleed just like you do. We have feelings just like you do. Let us read the same books and we'll understand it just like you do! — Lenny Wilkens

I think the reason working-class people don't write books is because they are encouraged to believe that only certain people are permitted to write books. — Len Deighton

As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest. — Hermann Hesse

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 am not one to generalize, but cartoonists, as a group, exhibit a level of social sophistication generally associated with pie fights. In high school, when the future lawyers were campaigning for class president, the future cartoonists were painstakingly altering illustrations in their history books so that Robert E. Lee appeared to be performing an illegal act with his horse. — Dave Barry

I'm hardly the first to point out that middle-class America has a parenting problem. In hundreds of books and articles this problem has been painstakingly diagnosed, critiqued, and named: overparenting, hyperparenting, helicopter parenting, and, my personal favorite, the kindergarchy. — Pamela Druckerman

The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here am I, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions - notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful - are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about half-way up the social hierarchy. — George Orwell

I wanted to be a witch when I was a kid. I was obsessed with witchcraft. At school, me and my two friends had these spell books; I always wanted a more magical reality. I had a little shrine at home and I did a spell to try and make the boy in the other class fall in love with me. — Florence Welch

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

They didn't exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen. Even in sensible school shoes, she shuffled as though barefoot, and the baggy apparel Mrs. Lisbon bought for her only increased her appeal, as though after undressing she had put on whatever was handy. In corduroys her thighs rubbed together, buzzing, and there was always at least one untidy marvel to unravel him: an untucked shirttail, a sock with a hole, a ripped seam showing underarm hair. She carted her books from class to class but never opened them. Her pens and pencils were as temporary as Cinderella's broom. When she smiled, her mouth showed too many teeth, but at night Trip Fontaine dreamed of being bitten by each one. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I fidget through class, barely paying attention to Mrs. Schumaker droning on about wagon trains and buffalo. I get it. Life on the prairie was tough. Churning your own butter? Yay for the Industrial Revolution. — Mick Bogerman

I'm often asked how I write books, but I don't think my approach is suitable for everyone. If I walked into a creative writing class, all I could say to them was 'I tend to make it up as I go along.' I'm not sure that's brilliant advice. — Ian Rankin

A critical faculty is a terrible thing. When I was eleven there were no bad films, just films I didn't want to see, there was no bad food, just Brussels sprouts and cabbage, and there were no bad books - everything I read was great. Then suddenly, I woke up in the morning and all that had changed. How could my sister not hear that David Cassidy was not in the same class as Black Sabbath? Why on EARTH would my English teacher think that 'The History of Mr Polly' was better than 'Ten Little Indians' by Agatha Christie? And from that moment on, enjoyment has been a much more elusive quality. — Nick Hornby

This small encounter had a disproportionately large effect on me. I saw myself in relief, separate and distinct from the others in the class, and even though he didn't speak to me in that way for a long time, I began to regard Professor Rose as a secret ally. This transformation took place gradually, and I can't say whether it existed solely in my mind or whether he was responsible for it. I know that I started to look forward to seeing him on Tuesdays, that his face was pleasing, his severity undercut by humor, and that I read the assigned books with new zeal. — Siri Hustvedt

I'd say that what I do is like a crack in the mirror. If you go back over the books from Carrie on up, what you see is an observation of ordinary middle-class American life as it's lived at the time that particular book was written. In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that's inexplicable to you, whether it's the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we're still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts. — Stephen King

I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it. — Edward Hirsch

We can get carried away with our heads in books, and although there's so much to be learned from that, I think sitting in a cafe and speaking with someone - whatever it is, their mannerisms, their choices, are just as valuable as any class you can go to. — Rose McIver

Uh, Miss Carlson," I said, standing at her desk after everybody else had gone on to their next class, "somebody told me you went to that guy's funeral the one the highway patrol shot."
"Yes," SHe said. "I did."
She didn't look like she was mad at me about it. She had real long eyelashes. I bet she was good-looking when she was young.
"Was he a relative or something?" That was what I was afraid of.
"No. Not even a friend really." She paused, like she was hunting for the right words. Finally she said, "I read a book once that ended with the words 'the incommunicable past' You can only share the past with someone who's shared it with you. So I can't explain to you what Mark was to me, exactly. I knew him a long time ago. — S.E. Hinton

The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I was always an avid reader of books. My vocabulary, my English are all thanks to that reading habit. Reading keeps me grounded. I came from a very middle class family - poor, in fact. — Madhur Bhandarkar

A history of the working class in the United States should, first of all, give a sense of what is meant by "the working class in the United States." It means most of us who live in the United States of America-which, unfortunately, has not been the focus of a majority of history books that claim to tell the story of this country. This doesn't make sense because without the working class there would be no United States. (From a certain point of view, this history book deficiency does make sense, given the biases built into our business-dominated culture.) — Paul Le Blanc

I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies - though shifting the balance matters - but that maybe the whole point of reading is to be able to explore and also transcend your gender (and race and class and orientation and nationality and moment in history and age and ability) and experience being others. — Rebecca Solnit

Dear Ms. Dunne,
I was hoping that you could come to the school to discuss Katie's rapidly deteriorating behavior in class. Her attention span is short and she distracts other students by her note-passing. How does Wednesday after school sound? You can reach me at the school. You know the number.
Ms. Casey

To Katie,
What do you mean your mum just laughed?
From Toby

Ahern, Cecelia (2005-02-01). Love, Rosie (p. 99). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition. — Cecelia Ahern

I had no money to buy books, so between classes and work, I haunted the library. I even tutored in French with a sliding scale of payment: twenty dollars for an A, fifteen for a B, ten for a C, five for a D. — Hubert H. Humphrey

Q. Which is my favorite country?
A. The United States of America. Not because I'm chauvinistic or xenophobic, but because I believe that we alone have it all, even if not to perfection. The U.S. has the widest possible diversity of spectacular scenery and depth of natural resources; relatively clean air and water; a fascinatingly heterogeneous population living in relative harmony; safe streets; few deadly communicable diseases; a functioning democracy; a superlative Constitution; equal opportunity in most spheres of life; an increasing tolerance of different races, religions, and sexual preferences; equal justice under the law; a free and vibrant press; a world-class culture in books,films, theater, museums, dance, and popular music; the cuisines of every nation; an increasing attention to health and good diet; an abiding entrepreneurial spirit; and peace at home. — Albert Podell

Olly: jesus. is there a girl on this planet who doesn't love mr.darcy
Madeline: All girls love Mr. Darcy?
Olly: are you kidding? even my sister loves darcy and she doesn't love anybody
Madeline: She must love somebody. I'm sure she loves you
Olly: what's so great about darcy?
Madeline: That's not a serious question
Olly: he's a snob
Madeline: But he overcomes it and eventually realizes that character matters more than class! He's a man open to learning life's lessons! Also, he's completely gorgeous and noble and brooding and poetic. Did I mention gorgeous? Also, he loves Elizabeth beyond all reason. — Nicola Yoon

The boy was a model pupil, forgettable and easily forgotten, and he sent much of his spare time in the back of the English class where there were shelves of old paperbacks, and in the school library, a large room filled with books and old armchairs, where he read stories as enthusiastically as some children ate. — Neil Gaiman

I created 'Captain Underpants' when I was in the second grade. I was constantly getting in trouble for being the class clown, so my teacher sent me out into the hallway to punish me. It was there in the hall that I began drawing 'Captain Underpants'. Soon I was making my own comic books about him. — Dav Pilkey

At such times a young couple found it difficult to believe that in a few hours the whistle would call them, two slaves amongst a multitude of slaves, when they felt that each other was the most important person in the world! They walked on air, and saw the stars shine , and even poverty could not numb their hearts, but let them stray for a short time in that fairy garden whose gate opens but once , and , once closing, nevermore! Miss Nobody- Ethel Carnie — Ethel Carnie Holdsworth

I'm the classic example of alienation: I grew up in a middle-class household without art or books. I was going to be a chemical engineer until I went to the theatre for the first time at 16 and was blown away by it. — Richard Eyre

Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is to entertain. These books are not concerned with style or creativity - instead they are successful because they are repetitive and follow a template that readers enjoy. — Umberto Eco

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with "Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?" and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don't know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Our job, then, is two-fold: to focus on our own failings as writers. But also to speak more forcefully as advocates for literature. Books are a powerful antidote for loneliness, for the moral purposelessness of the leisure class. It's our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don't read books, who instead medicate themselves in front of screens, that literary art isn't some esoteric tradition, but a direct path to meaning, to an understanding of the terror that lives beneath our consumptive ennui. — Steve Almond

You know, I have a lot of books on my iPad, but when I try to read them, I find myself wandering off to play games. Those are books I'm interested in. I can't imagine what would have happened to me in college if my biology class had been on the same computer as 'Words With Friends' and 'Doom.' — Gail Collins

Speaking of, Kellan texted me yesterday, while I was in Annar: So. Today, I didn't see you at school. In class. In History, even.

I'd been amazed to discover that apparently my cell phone coverage included Annar.

Lyons, Heather (2012-08-25). A Matter of Fate (Fate Series Book 1) (p. 118). Cerulean Books. Kindle Edition. — Heather Lyons

To write books you need not only comfort and solitude - and solitude is never easy to attain in a working-class home - you also need piece of mind. You can't settle in to anything, you can't command the spirit of hope in which anything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you. — George Orwell

The capacity for friendship usually goes with highly developed civilizations. The ability to cultivate people differs by culture and class; but on the whole, educated people have more ways to make friends ... In England, for instance, you find everyone in your class has read the same books. Here, people grope for something in common-like a newly engaged girl who came to me and said, It's absolutely wonderful! His uncle and my cousin were on the same football team. — Margaret Mead

HOGWARTS SCHOOL of WITCHCRAFT and WIZARDRY Headmaster: Albus Dumbledore (Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand Sorc., Chf. Warlock, Supreme Mugwump, International Confed. of Wizards) Dear Mr. Potter, We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment. Term begins on September 1. We await your owl by no later than July 31. Yours sincerely, Minerva McGonagall, Deputy Headmistress — J.K. Rowling

I don't care about periods or commas or misspellings at this time, even though this is English class. What I want to do is to get you so excited about reading and writing that the love of learning will be with you for the rest of your lives. I don't want to hinder your natural joy of wanting to venture into a world of books and writing and wanting to learn. — Victor Villasenor

I learned to read at the age of five, in Brother Justiniano's class at the De la Salle Academy in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space and allowing me to travel with Captain Nemo twenty thousand leagues under the sea, fight with d'Artagnan, Athos, Portos, and Aramis against the intrigues threatening the Queen in the days of the secretive Richelieu, or stumble through the sewers of Paris, transformed into Jean Valjean carrying Marius's inert body on my back. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

I'd seen the older children in class look into books for invisible traces, as if they were driven by the same force and, sinking deeper into silence, they were able to draw from the dead paper something that seemed alive. — Muriel Barbery

...but wasn't everyone in England supposed to be a detective? Wasn't every crime, no matter how complex, solved in a timely fashion by either a professional or a hobbyist? That's the impression you get from British books and TV shows. Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hetty Wainthropp, Inspector George Gently: they come from every class and corner of the country. There's even Edith Pargeter's Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk who solved crimes in twelfth-century Shrewsbury. No surveillance cameras, no fingerprints, not even a telephone, and still he cracked every case that came his way. — David Sedaris

Back in the class room, open your books, keep up, the teacher don't know how mean she looks. — Chuck Berry

My favorite book is The Mysterious Island. I order my books from a flimsy catalog the teacher hands out to every student in the class. Emil and the Detectives. White Fang. Like that. Money is tight for us, but when it comes to books my mother is a spendthrift; I can order as many as I like. I sit here day after day, waiting for my books to arrive. My books. It takes a month or more, but when they finally do, when the teacher opens the big box and passes out the orders to the kids, checking the books against a form taken from her desk, I glow with happiness. I've never had the newest dress, or the prettiest, but I always have the tallest stack of books. Little paperbacks that smell of wet ink. I lay my cheek against their cool covers, anticipating the stories inside, knowing all the other girls wonder what I could possibly want with those books. — Greg Iles

I was never really a nerd. I'm not really into comic books or Dungeons and Dragons or any of that kind of stuff. I was in drama class, and I'm a big movie and music buff. And I'm into sports. — Christopher Mintz-Plasse

The writer has a life and a personality but the problem of today is that most of those writers have exactly the same life; they belong to the same social class, the same milieu, they have the same experiences. Once you read one of those books, you have read them all. And this is a problem. — Pascal Bruckner

He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery. — William Hazlitt

The indexing problem changes with each new book undertaken. To meet the needs of different classes of seekers and to suit various types of books, rules entirely satisfactory in one case must be varied in the next and perhaps ignored or even reversed for a third ... Indexing is a highly complex intellectual process involving the use of language in a specific and somewhat artificial way, and that it is also to a considerable extent a matter of intuition, the workings of which cannot be reduced to fixed rules. It is 'knowing what but not knowing how'. — Hans H Wellisch

The books people are writing today, they're too long. You get a little bit of plot, and then pages and pages of Creative Writing. They teach classes in how to do this. They should teach classes in how to stop! — Douglas Adams

I was the quiet kid in the corner, reading a book. In elementary school, I read so much and so often during class that I was actually forbidden from reading books during school hours by my teachers. — Cassandra Clare

Book clubs are totally dope - like English class if you were allowed to read only books that you actually like and snack and sip while discussing them. — Sam Maggs

Having thus acknowledged what I owe those who have aided and approved me, I turn to another class; a small one, so far as I know, but not, therefore, to be overlooked. I mean the timorous or carping few who doubt the tendency of such books as "Jane Eyre:" in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry - that parent of crime - an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth. I would suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions; I would remind them of certain simple truths. — Charlotte Bronte

Even when I was living below the poverty line as a novelist, I was still living better than 99.5% of the human population of the world. But in my little, soft realm of trying to amuse a few dozen middle-class people with my books and articles, I did struggle to survive in my own way. — Jonathan Ames

The 1930s birthed two great agrarian novels: 'Gone with the Wind' from the viewpoint of the ruling class, 'The Grapes of Wrath' for the underclass. And both were turned into movies that dared to be true to the books' controversial themes. — Richard Corliss

I was there to get a Ph.D. in English literature. That's not true. I was there to read a lot of books and to discuss them with bright, insightful, book-loving people, an expectation that I pretty quickly learned was about as silly as it could be.
Certainly there were other people who loved books, I'm sure there were, but whoever had notified them ahead of time that loving books was not the point, was, in fact, a hopelessly counterproductive and naive approach to the study of literature, neglected to notify me. It turned out that the point was to dissect a book like a fetal pig in biology class or to break its back with a single sentence or to bust it open like a milkweek pod and say, "See? All along it was only fluff," and then scatter it into oblivion with one tiny breath. — Marisa De Los Santos

Gideon and I sit there in the dark, wordless for a while, only our ragged breaths disturbing the silence. Memories of my sister overwhelm me - I see her impish grin as she leans over me at the orphanage, tugging on my hair until I wake up. I remember us climbing up to the roof as kids, sitting cross-legged next to the herbs and vegetables our caretakers were growing while we read the English books Rose had "borrowed" from her class at school. And then there was L.A. - all of our hope for a better life so quickly crushed, but Rose never let despair overtake her. She was there after every single night to hold me until the pain went away. And later, when I got numb to it all, she still made a point of holding me, of promising me that one day things would be different. — Paula Stokes

Books were not looked upon as things unobtainable due to economic circumstances or class status. My grandfather stole an entire set of Dicken's from the local library. — Bob Hartley

There may be little room for the display of this supreme qualification in the retail book business, but there is room for some. Be enterprising. Get good people about you. Make your shop windows and your shops attractive. The fact that so many young men and women enter the teaching profession shows that there are still some people willing to scrape along on comparatively little money for the pleasure of following an occupation in which they delight. It is as true to-day as it was in Chaucer's time that there is a class of men who "gladly learn and gladly teach," and our college trustees and overseers and rich alumni take advantage of this and expect them to live on wages which an expert chauffeur would regard as insufficient. Any bookshop worthy of survival can offer inducements at least as great as the average school or college. Under pleasant conditions you will meet pleasant people, for the most part, whom you can teach and form whom you may learn something. — A. Edward Newton

My old geography professor once told his class how the music, paintings, sculptures, and books of the world are mirror in which people see versions of themselves. — Simon Van Booy

This unrivalled tutor used as His class-book the best of books. Although able to reveal fresh truth, He preferred to expound the old. He knew by His omniscience what was the most instructive way of teaching, and by turning at once to Moses and the prophets, He showed us that the surest road to wisdom is not speculation, reasoning, or reading human books, but meditation upon the Word of God. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

What can it matter to me,' he says, 'whether people read my books or not? It may matter to (the critics)
but I have too much money to want more, and if the books have any stuff in them it will work by and by. I do not know nor greatly care whether they are good or not. What opinion can any sane man form about his own work? Some people must write stupid books just as there must be junior ops and third-class poll men. Why should I complain of being among the mediocrities? If a man is not absolutely below mediocrity let him be thankful
besides, the books will have to stand by themselves some day, so the sooner they begin the better. — Samuel Butler

Now she is inviting you to a seminar at the university, where books are analyzed according to all Codes, Conscious and Unconscious, and in which all Taboos are eliminated, the ones imposed by the dominant Sex, Class, and Culture. — Italo Calvino

Successive generations of middle-class parents used to foist their own favourite books on their children. But some time in the late Eighties it began to wane - not because children had lost interest in adorable animals but because most of it was available on useful, pacifying video. — Peter York

My view of writing "Coldest Girl in Coldtown" was to take every single thing that I loved from every vampire book I had ever read and dump it into one book
everything I like
trying to evoke some of the decadence ... Vampires are a high-class monster: They want to dress up. They want to drink a lot of absinthe, or force their victims to drink a lot of absinthe. They have big parties and have elegant rituals. I think that's a thing we associate with vampires
they are the royalty of our monsters. We expect them to be rich, we expect them to be well-dressed. I wanted to have some of that be true because I like it, and have some of it not be true because it's kind of weird.
I wanted to put in the idea of infection, which I was really interested in and which was a big feature of the vampire books I read growing up. And, the fear and desire for infection
the way in which our urge towards loving vampires is nihilistic. Our fear of them is our survival instincts kicking in. — Holly Black

Once I began a book, I couldn't put it down. It was like an addiction; I read while I ate, on the train, in bed until late at night, in school, where I'd keep the book hidden so I could read during class. But I had almost no desire to talk with anyone about the experience I gained through books and music. I felt happy just being me and no one else. — Haruki Murakami

This week in school they made us read Frankenstein. It was cool. I liked it. I like books that make me think. That's why I'm in the advanced class. My favorite part is when the monster looks at Dr. Frankenstein and tells him it's his fault. It kinda reminds me of now. You called me a monster. I walked way. Then you threatened the monster. And so if it comes down to you or me, I have to pick me. — J.J. McAvoy

All I could determine was that it must have been a nice thing to see if it was a house you were thinking about moving into. But not so nice if it was the house you were moving out from. I could practically hear Mr Collins, who had taught my fifth-grade English class and was still the most intimidating teacher I'd ever had, yelling at me. "Amy Curry," I could still hear him intoning, "never end a sentence with a preposition!" Irked that after six hears he was still mentally correcting me, I told the Mr. Collins in my head to off fuck. — Morgan Matson

Beneath Albright's office, the colliery sprawled across the hillside, red brick buildings scattered as though hurled from a great height, a hotchpotch of mismatched structures spattered on the valley floor. At the bottom stood the winding house, wheels motionless, above it, the engineering sheds and workshops, canteen and bath house. All lay empty. No buzz and hum of machinery. No voices raised in laughter or dispute. Gwyn found it unsettling: his lads had been out a month and a half and already the power had drained from the place. In the stillness, he caught the echo of footsteps. The crunch of boots on gravel. Generations of long-gone Pritchards clocking in and out. He was bound to Blackthorn by the coal that clogged his veins and by a bond of duty. The strike left him as diminished as his pit, day dragging after idle day. — Kit Habianic

My mother taught me that reading is a kind of work, and that every paragraph merits exertion, and in this way, I learned how to absorb difficult books. Soon after I went to kindergarten, however, I learned that reading difficult books also brings trouble. I was punished for reading ahead of the class, for being unwilling to speak and act "nicely." I didn't know why I simultaneously feared and adored my female teachers, but I did know that I needed their attention — Hope Jahren

The greatest predictor of social pathology in children is fatherlessness, greater even than poverty. In his book Fatherless Generation (Zondervan) John Sowers claims, "The most reliable predictor for gang activity and youth violence is neither social class nor race or education but fatherlessness." In Fatherless America (Basic Books) David Blankenhorn says, "It is no exaggeration to say that fatherlessness is the most harmful demographic trend of this generation. It is the engine driving our most urgent social problems". I am convinced that the damage to humanity caused by the epidemic of unfathered men and women is far greater than the damage caused by war and disease combined. — Craig Wilkinson

Wondering whether Christianity is real is not the same as wondering whether Christianity is true. If you question the truth of Christianity, you can do something tangible about it. You can read books, take a class, or talk to someone about it. But what can you do when you're already convinced it's true but don't experience it as real? — Gregory A. Boyd

In every age in which books have been produced, the governing class, the respectable, have been opposed to the works of real genius. — Robert Green Ingersoll

I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy Drew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey. — Fran Lebowitz

I might think that equality has been achieved, there is no power relation going on in terms of class, race, or gender, I might just want to drink my latte and buy pretty shoes and write books about girls who marry, die, or go insane, then go get my nails done. — Lidia Yuknavitch

My working-class Italian-American parents didn't go to school, there were no books in the house. — Martin Scorsese

In all of my books, I really want to work with working-class people. My goal is to show the moments of grace and dignity in their lives. — Matt De La Pena

Antonio's fixation was always the same: Sarratore's son {Nino}. He was afraid that I would talk to him, even that I would see him {at school}. Naturally, to prevent him from suffering, I concealed the fact that I ran into Nino entering school, coming out, in the corridors. Nothing particularly happened, at most we exchanged a nod of greeting and went on our way: I could have talked to my boyfriend about it without any problems if he had been a reasonable person. But Antonio was not reasonable and in truth I wasn't either. Although Nino gave me no encouragement, a mere glimpse of him left me distracted during class. His presence a few classrooms away - real, alive, better educated than the professors, and courageous, and disobedient - drained meaning from the teachers' lectures, the pages of books, the plans for marriage, the gas pump on the Stradonr. — Elena Ferrante

We did not adopt socialism out of books, abstractions, humanism, or pity, but rather out of need for the Arab working class is the mover of history in this period. — Michel Aflaq

They don't really focus on that history here in America. I remember growing up as a kid, history class was very washed-over. They didn't really get into the gritty bits of slavery. It's a very, very small section in the history books. It's not something they really touch on directly with American curriculums. — Aldis Hodge

Ezra clapped his hands. "all right," he said. "In addition to the books we're reading as a class, I want to do an extra side project on unreliable narrators." Devon Arliss raised her hand. "what does that mean?" Ezra strode around the room. "well, the narrator tells us the story in the book, right? But what if ... the narrator isn't telling us the truth? Maybe he's telling us his skewed version of the story to get you on his side. Or to scare you. Or maybe he's crazy! — Sara Shepard

There must always be a fringe of the experimental in literature
poems bizarre in form and curious in content, stories that overreach for what has not hitherto been put in story form, criticism that mingles a search for new truth with bravado. We should neither scoff at this trial margin nor take it too seriously. Without it, literature becomes inert and complacent. But the everyday person's reading is not, ought not to be, in the margin. He asks for a less experimental diet, and his choice is sound. If authors and publishers would give him more heed they would do wisely. They are afraid of the swarming populace who clamor for vulgar sensation (and will pay only what it is worth), and they are afraid of petulant literati who insist upon sophisticated sensation (and desire complimentary copies). The stout middle class, as in politics and industry, has far less influence than its good sense and its good taste and its ready purse deserve. — Henry Seidel Canby

The class went all right, and the ones after became easier. I was enthusiastic, naive and idealistic, and I was in love with my books. — Azar Nafisi

Reading was like an addiction; I read while I ate, on the train, in bed until late at night, in school, where I'd keep the book hidden so I could read during class. Before long I bought a small stereo and spent all my time in my room, listening to jazz records. But I had almost no desire to talk to anyone about the experience I gained through books and music. I felt happy just being me and no one else. In that sense I could be called a stack-up loner. — Haruki Murakami

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

In all my novels, a sense of place - not just geographic but social - is a critical element. I have always been drawn to the novels of Edith Wharton, among others, where social dynamics are crucial. Wharton's class consciousness fascinates me, and some of the tension in my books stems from that. — Susan Wiggs

Burns immediately left the class, and going into the small inner room where the books were kept, returned in half a minute, carrying in her hand a bundle of twigs tied together at one end. This ominous tool she presented to Miss Scatcherd with a respectful curtesy; then she quietly, and without being told, unloosed her pinafore, and the teacher instantly and sharply inflicted on her neck a dozen strokes with the bunch of twigs. Not a tear rose to Burns' eye; and, while I paused from my sewing, because my fingers quivered at this spectacle with a sentiment of unavailing and impotent anger, not a feature of her pensive face altered its ordinary expression. "Hardened girl!" exclaimed Miss Scatcherd; "nothing can correct you of your slatternly habits: carry the rod away." Burns obeyed: I looked at her narrowly as she emerged from the book-closet; she was just putting back her handkerchief into her pocket, and the trace of a tear glistened on her thin cheek. — Charlotte Bronte

Based on my own experience, I believe the brain is as soft and malleable as bread dough when we're young. I am grateful for every class trip to the symphony I went on and curse any night I was allowed to watch The Brady Bunch, because all of it stuck. Conversely, I am now capable of forgetting entire novels that I've read, and I've been influenced not at all by books I passionately love and would kill to be influenced by. Think about this before you let your child have an iPad. — Ann Patchett

There is a class whose value I should designate as Favorites: such as Froissart's Chronicles; Southey's Chronicle of the Cid ; Cervantes ; Sully's Memoirs ; Rabelais ; Montaigne ; Izaak Walton; Evelyn; Sir Thomas Browne; Aubrey ; Sterne ; Horace Walpole ; Lord Clarendon ; Doctor Johnson ; Burke, shedding floods of light on his times ; Lamb; Landor ; and De Quincey ;- a list, of course, that may easily be swelled, as dependent on individual caprice. Many men are as tender and irritable as lovers in reference to these predilections. Indeed, a man's library is a sort of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great pudency in showing their books to a stranger. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

What I liked most was that George had class, the way he walked and talked, reading Shakespeare and all those books. He knew about van Gogh and Picasso, he gave me a book about Dali. And just the way he conducted himself, you could see it. He was very elegant in his manners. — Bruce Porter

At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me.
I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then — Alison Bechdel

It perplexes me how many people write books where everyone comes from the same basic set of backgrounds - middle class, white, straight, etc. It's like writing a book set in a world without coincidences, accidents, and colors. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT? It reduces drama and conflicts and narrows the possible variety of points of view. And really, the whole magic of books is to show us the world through someone else's eyes. Experiencing the Other is what novels are for. — Scott Westerfeld

Race, class, childhood experience, the books I found on my mother's bookshelf, the albums I found in my father's basement - these things are all part of who I am and will always be a part of my work. — Rashid Johnson

Few of us make any serious effort to remember what we read. When I read a book, what do I hope will stay with me a year later? If it's a work of nonfiction, the thesis, maybe, if the book has one. A few savory details, perhaps. If it's fiction, the broadest outline of the plot, something about the main characters (at least their names), and an overall critical judgment about the book. Even these are likely to fade. Looking up at my shelves, at the books that have drained so many of my waking hours, is always a dispiriting experience. One Hundred Years of Solitude: I remember magical realism and that I enjoyed it. But that's about it. I don't even recall when I read it. About Wuthering Heights I remember exactly two things: that I read it in a high school English class and that there was a character named Heathcliff. I couldn't say whether I liked the book or not. — Joshua Foer

Taking pity on me, Carissa kept her voice low. "You were calling out for Daemon."I dropped my face in my hands and moaned. "Oh, God."
Lesa giggled. "It was kind of cute."
A minute before the tardy bell rang, I felt an all-too-familiar warmth on my neck and glanced up. Daemon swaggered into class. Textbook-less as usual. He had a notebook, but I don't think he ever wrote anything in it. I was beginning to suspect our math teacher was an alien, because how else would Daemon get away with not doing a damn thing in class? He passed by without so much as a look.
I twisted around in my chair. "I need to talk to you."
He slid into his desk chair. "Okay."
"In private," I whispered.
His expression didn't change as he leaned back in his chair. "Meet me in the library at lunch. No one really goes in there. You know, with all those books and stuff. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

I've only cried at one book, but I'm too embarrassed to tell you which. It wasn't terribly intellectual. I will admit, though, to crying when I've read books aloud to my elementary class. We read a biography of Gandhi once, and it was very difficult to read the part where Gandhi was killed, because they were waiting for a happy ending. — Rebecca Makkai