English Professor Quotes & Sayings

Until the June 1967 war I was completely caught up in the life of a young professor of English. Beginning in 1968, I started to think, write, and travel as someone who felt himself to be directly involved in the renaissance of Palestinian life and politics. — Edward Said

As a former English professor, I can assure you that grammar is the qualitative interpolation of language. Adjectives, pronouns, predicates, past pluperfect indicative - ridiculous. It has qualities, shadings, differentiations, rhythmic structures of symbolic meaning. — Frederick Lenz

Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example? — Richard Russo

I'm still an English professor at Rice University here in Houston. They've been very generous in letting me on a very long leash to just work on 'The Passage' and its sequels. — Justin Cronin

The poet and poetess have always had a rough time of it in the Republic. It has ever been their endemic luck to starve, become a Harvard professor, commit suicide, lose their reading glasses before an audience of sophomores, go upon the people a la Barnum, and serve as homework in state universities, where they could in nowise get a position and where their presence usually scatters the English faculty like a truant officer among the Amish. — Guy Davenport

My dad was an English professor. — Blake Lively

Edward had a personal horror of violence and never endorsed or excused it, though in a documentary he made about the conflict he said that actions like the bombing of pilgrims at Tel Aviv airport 'did more harm than good,' which I remember thinking was (a) euphemistic and (b) a slipshod expression unworthy of a professor of English. — Christopher Hitchens

In a talk at a recent Phi Beta Kappa meeting, Duke University professor Katherine Hayles confessed, "I can't get my students to read whole books anymore."10 Hayles teaches English; the students she's talking about are students of literature. — Nicholas Carr

I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels. — William Safire

I remember one time I heard this English professor asking the class what the world's scariest noise is. Is it a man crying out in pain? A woman's scream of terror? A gunshot? A baby crying? And the professor shakes his head and says, 'No, the scariest noise is, you're all alone in your dark house, you know you're all alone, you know that there is no chance anyone else is home or within miles - and then, suddenly, from upstairs, you hear the toilet flush. — Harlan Coben

People sort of accuse Tolkien of not being good with female characters, and I think that Eowyn actually proves that to be wrong to some degree. Eowyn is actually a strong female character, and she's a surprisingly modern character, considering who Tolkien actually was sort of a stuffy English professor in the 1930s and '40s. — Peter Jackson

I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school ... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering. — Ernest Hemingway,

We all laced together - a brothel madam, an English professor, a mute cook, a quadroon cabbie, and me, the girl carrying a bucket of lies and throwing them like confetti. — Ruta Sepetys

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

My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English. — Eric Allin Cornell

I never intended to be a historian of religion. My aim was to become a professor of English Literature in a university, but I had a series of absolute career disasters and found myself making television programs about the nature of religion and about Christian history and started to discover about other religious traditions, and that was an absolute eye-opener for me. — Karen Armstrong

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

What is wonderful about a university like LSE is that you not only receive teaching of very high quality, you also learn where to find the knowledge you are seeking. And you make unexpected discoveries;it was a Marxist professor who introduced me to the work of Cardinal Newman, a great master of English prose as well as theology. — Pierre Trudeau

Fiske spoke sharply to the four walls. "We need medical attention immediately. We have a gunshot wound that requires treatment."
"You're not going to get through to them by talking like an English professor," scoffed Reagan. "Hey!" she bawled. "Get a doctor down here! She's in pain, thanks to you! What are you going to do about it? — Gordon Korman

It is almost possible to measure a writer's skill by the dexterity with which he repeats, and yet avoids monotony. — George G. Williams

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either. — Kurt Vonnegut

I would go to newsstands and buy paperbacks they were selling for tourists, usually bestsellers and mass market paperbacks. In the beginning, it was like going to the Rosetta Stone
I didn?t understand anything, I'd get a headache
but I began to figure it out, and I'd read a lot of Stephen King paperbacks. I've always said he was my English professor. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The celebrated Parisian doctor Professor Xavier Bichat developed a fully materialist theory of the human body and mind in his lectures Physiological Researches on Life and Death, translated into English in 1816. Bichat defined life bleakly as 'the sum of the functions by which death is resisted — Richard Holmes

Professor Henry Higgins: There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years! — Alan Jay Lerner

One of my goals as a professor of English is to teach students to recognize and think critically about what makes something art. — Andrew Hoberek

But are there philosophical problems? The present position of English philosophy - my point of departure - originates, I believe, in the late Professor Ludwig Wittgenstein's doctrine that there are none; that all genuine problems are scientific problems; that the alleged propositions or theories of philosophy are pseudo-propositions or pseudo-theories; that they are not false (if they were false, their negations would be true propositions or theories) but strictly meaningless combinations of words, no more meaningful than the incoherent babbling of a child who has not yet learned to speak properly. — Karl Popper

Besides," she says, eyes twinkling mischievously, "it'd never work out between us. I'm still holding a candle for Professor Haven."
"How could I compete with a middle-aged English professor?"
"Well," she says, "you could do, but it'd be useless. Something about his receding hairline just drives me mad. — Seventhswan

Mom," said Peter, "nobody thinks you're a lackwit, if that's what you're worried about."
Lackwit? In what musty drawer of some dead English professor's dust-covered desk did you find that word? I assure you that never in my worst nightmares did I ever suppose that I was a lackwit. — Orson Scott Card

Is the professor who insists we read Ernest Hemingway again instead of Gertrude Stein "obsessing"? Because although I did a BA in English, an MFA in Poetry, and a year's worth of a PhD, Stein was an author I had to discover on my own. She wasn't on the syllabus anywhere in all that time. — Laura Mullen

As an English major I was familiar with the stories of dozens of writers trying to get their work done among the multifarious diversions of the world and the hurdles of their own vices. A professor had said that what saved writers is that they, like politicians, had the illusion of destiny that allowed them to overcome obstacles no matter how nominal their work. — Jim Harrison

For some hippies, this vision could only be realised by rejecting scientific progress as a false God and returning to nature. Others, in contrast, believed that technological progress would inevitably turn their libertarian principles into social fact. Crucially, influenced by the theories of Marshall McLuhan, these technophiliacs thought that the convergence of media, computing and telecommunications would inevitably create the electronic agora - a virtual place where everyone would be able to express their opinions without fear of censorship. Despite being a middle-aged English professor, McLuhan preached the radical message that the power of big business and big government would be imminently overthrown by the intrinsically empowering effects of new technology on individuals. — Richard Barbrook

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

My mother - both my mother and father had very successful careers. My mother's an English professor and my father is a scientist and physician. They worked at the same jobs for their entire life, 50 years each — David Plotz

I discovered Orson Welles in college; my freshman English professor screened 'Citizen Kane' for us, and I wound up writing a 20-page term paper on it. — Claire Danes

Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it. — Dean Wesley Smith

I trained as a writer before I became a lawyer. I was headed for a life as an English professor, but that just wasn't me. I'm not a scholar; I didn't have a scholar's attitude toward literature. — Scott Turow

Professors of classics - not even a professor of English - professors of classics, they're something sacred; it's almost like being a priest. — Erich Segal

Professor Cirksena, the only person within five hundred miles who knew anything about the history of English magic. Her former Ph.D. professor in psychology looked up from his work, and smiled. "Come in, my dear. — Karla Tipton

It was always important to me to be that kid who could rock the party as well as rock the English professor's mind. — Saul Williams

My freshman English professor at Kent State University in 1984 told me I was a good writer, and she loved all the silly pictures I drew in my notebook. She said I should try writing children's books, and so I did. — Dav Pilkey

We all tend to judge others by ourselves; that's human nature. Edward Said, a Palestinian born in Jerusalem and an English professor, was bitterly and viciously anti-British. He assumed that an Englishman who was a professor of Arabic would have the same attitude to his subject as he had to his. [Explaining why he, as a Jewish and British, was accused of barely conceal disdain for subject matter of his scholarship in Edward Said's 'Orientalism'] — Bernard Lewis

A novel can educate to some extent, but first a novel has to entertain. That's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page. I have a commitment to accessibility. I believe in plot. I want an English professor to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want the people I grew up with - who may not often read anything but the Sears catalog - to read my books. — Barbara Kingsolver

'Jane Eyre,' when I think of that book, it conjures up the best moments of college English courses. Literature is extraordinary, especially when you have a good professor. — Edward P. Jones

I just remembered songs my grandmother taught me, and songs that I learned for the recordings. But, then I learned to speak Italian. When I was there, I hired a professor who stayed with me 24 hours a day. She wouldn't let me speak a word of English. — Connie Francis

I started modeling when I was - not older, but not 12. I have a mom who's a feminist - she's an English professor, an intellectual. She really gave me the equipment to understand that you can celebrate yourself without putting yourself down or needing to apologize for the way you look. I think that attitude is really crucial for a model. — Emily Ratajkowski

I have three brothers and one sister, and I'm the third child. Sometimes people say, 'It's only natural you would become a writer - your parents were English professors.' But my four siblings were brought up in the exact same household, and no one else became a writer or an English professor. — Antonya Nelson