English Lit Quotes & Sayings

Seeing the way his trousers clung to those most English parts. — Seth Grahame-Smith

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

History class was a forty-minute squirm from which I would emerge unscathed by insight. Down the hall in English Lit, though, there were stories to be had, and it was stories I craved. — Nancy Horan

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

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

If you want your film to be instantly green-lit, your first approach is not to go to a relatively unknown English actor. They're not going to throw millions of dollars at you for that. — Martin Freeman

Bashful=Spanish, Miss Gardenia
Doc=Psychology, Mr. Wang
Happy=Chemistry 2, Mr. Durbin
Dopey=English Lit., Mr. Purcell
Dippy=Math, Mrs. Craig
Dumbass=PE, Coach Crater — Lisa McMann

I accept that he has a past. I wasn't a saint before we met." She slid me a glance. "I wasn't." "You were a nerdy English lit student; you were as close as it gets without beatification. — Chloe Neill

So you're like a ... an amateur sleuth?"
"God no. I'm more like the hapless guys in those film-noir flicks we used to watch. I keep getting tangled up in bizarro events."
"Oh yes?" His eyes lit with enthusiasm. I was speaking his language now. "Guy Pearce in L.A. Confidential or William Hurt in Body Heat?"
"I was thinking more like Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam. — Josh Lanyon

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

Since we had always sky about,
when we had eagles they flew out
leaving no shadow bigger then wrens'
to trouble our most aeromantic hens.
Too busy bridging loneliness to be alone
we hacked in ties what Emily etched in bone.
We French, we English, never lost our civil war,
Endure it still, a bloodless civil bore;
No wounded lying about, no Whitman wanted.
It's only by our lack of ghosts we're haunted. — Earle Birney

Love is simple, if you allow it to be simple. Julian to Hannah, Take A Chance — Alison Wong

When I was in school, in eighth grade, someone recognized something in me. She was an English teacher, and we read a play out loud in class, and she asked me to read one of the roles. I'd never done anything like that before, but something just lit up. — David Morse

When we were kids, Fitz was unbeatable in Scrabble. It would drive Eric crazy, because he wasn't used to be bested by Fitz in much of anything. But Fitz had an uncanny memory, and once he saw a word, he wouldn't forget it. [ ... ] But Eric wasn't used to be second-best, so he commissioned me into teaching him the dictionary. [ ... ] Three weeks after we'd taken on the English language, it rained on a Saturday. "Hey," Fitz suggested, like usual. "Bet I can whip you in Scrabble."
Eric looked at me. "Huh," he said, "What makes you think that?"
"Um ... the five hundred and seventy thousand other times I've kicked your ass?"
Fitz knew. The moment Eric laid down the letters J-A-R-L and then casually mentioned that it was a term for a Scandinavian noble, Fitz's eyes lit up. — Jodi Picoult

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

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

In the end it comes down to two rival versions of the English middle afternoon. Post-Barrett, Pink Floyd kept on in a middle-afternoonish vein, but they fell in love with the idea of portentous storm clouds in the offing somewhere over Grantchester ... Barrett's afternoonishness was far more supple and engaging. It superimposed the hippie cult of eternal solstice on the pre-teatime daydreams of one's childhood, occasioned by a slick of sunlight on a chest of drawers ... His afternoonishness is lit by an importunate adult intelligence that can't quite get back to the place it longs to be ... Barrett created the same precocious longing in adolescents.
I remember 'See Emily Play' drifting across a school corridor in 1967 ... and I remember the powerful wish to stay suspended indefinitely in that music ... I also remember the quasi-adult intimation that this wasn't possible.
[from the London Review of Books for January 2, 2003] — Jeremy Harding

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

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

Gower is the first English writer to use "history" as an English word. He regularly rhymes the term with "memory," for to his way of thinking history and memory are correlative. That is, without history, there can be no memory; and without memory, there can be no history. But the point of historical knowledge is not to enable people to live in the past, or even to understand the past in the way we would expect a modern historian to proceed; rather, it is to enable people to live more vitally in the present. — Russell A. Peck

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

Through atoms of grey-blue air the sun struck at English fields and lit up marshes and pools, a white gull on a stake, the slow sail of shadows over blunt-headed woods and young corn and flowing hayfields. It beat on the orchard wall, and every pit and grain of the brick was silver pointed, purple, fiery as if soft to touch, as if touched it must melt into hot-baked grains of dust. — Virginia Woolf

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

School is disappointing. If science is exciting and art is exhilarating, the schools and universities have achieved the not inconsiderable feat of rendering both dull. As every scientist and poet knows, one discovers both vocations in spite of, not because of school. It takes years to recover from the stupor of being taught Shakespeare in English Lit and Wheatstone's bridge in Physics. — Walker Percy

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

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

Now," she said when all was ready and lit the silver sconces on either side of the mirror. What woman would not have kindled to see what Orlando saw then burning in the snow
for all about the looking glass were snowy lawns, and she was like a fire, a burning bush, and the candle flames about her head were silver leaves; or again, the glass was green water, and she a mermaid, slung with pearls, a siren in a cave, singing so that oarsmen leant from their boats and fell down, down to embrace her; so dark, so bright, so hard, so soft, was she, so astonishingly seductive that it was a thousand pities that there was no one there to pt it in plain English, and say outright "Damn it Madam, you are loveliness incarnate," which was the truth. — Virginia Woolf

The lady in the latrine, Julie DuBois, and I were on our first date after three weeks of shameless flirting. I'm about forty, Julie's about thirty - a PhD in English lit, a professor at American University, learned, tenured, brilliant, blonde, blue-eyed - and, not that it matters, also quite attractive. I had been looking forward to this date for a week; I really wanted to get Julie's take on Marcel Proust's persistent use of subordinate clauses, a literary mystery I can never seem to get out of my mind - and yes, Julie was having trouble believing that, too. But men who date women for their looks alone are pigs. — Brian Haig