Top 40 English Literature Quotes

I fell even more deeply in love with Tolkien’s legendarium after studying Old English literature at uni, as I got a sense of the historical events and cultures that Tolkien used to create his world. My favourite of his imaginary locations is Lothlorien.

When I was writing stories about Chinese American characters in my fiction classes, I’d get comments like, ‘You should consider writing more universal stories.’ But anything can happen to a Chinese American girl – just as much of the canon of English literature involves white men or women.

I might not have been academically gifted – I was bad at maths, and science was a struggle – but I was good at English literature and became hooked on theatre.

I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn’t have access to previously.

I was always drawn to teachers who made class interesting. In high school, I enjoyed my American and English literature classes because my teachers, Jeanne Dorsey and Dani Barton, created an environment where interaction was important.

I went to university in the north of England at University of Birmingham to do an English literature degree, and I knew I could do extracurricular stuff with theater and drama. I started a theater company, called Article 19, and I did it with a bunch of friends. I wrote and directed plays. I had a radio show.

I grew up loving computers and math, actually. I also loved English literature and French, but I became obsessed with computers when the Apple II was coming out.

I went to University College London and read English literature, then realised if you were interested in story and narrative, film was the way to go.

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.

At Harvard, I majored in English Literature.

I was in the final year of my English Literature degree at Hindu College, Delhi University, when I came to Mumbai. I liked the city and the sense of freedom – here, I wasnt a principals daughter anymore.

I studied religions and all kinds of other things in college. I took a Shakespearean villain course for English literature. It was really intense. I think that sort of rounds a person. In this business, it’s really important for us to be interesting… and have interests.

I did art history and English literature at Newcastle.

In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar.

For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one’s literary education very incomplete.

I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.

Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.

Having spent half my time at university studying English literature, I know from experience that reading lists often contain more white men than Jacob Rees-Mogg’s last birthday party.

It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.

My mother’s father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay’s ‘Lays of Ancient Rome.’ While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I’d be Horatius keeping the bridge.

My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.

I’ve loved ‘Vanity Fair’ since I was 16 years old. You know, we’re all colonial hangovers in India, steeped in English literature. It is one of these novels that I read under the covers at my convent boarding school in Simla.

I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.

I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn’t a religion major really.

I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.

There’s always a host of voices you’re inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He’s one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.

I don’t only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and… ants. I can understand ants.

Under Milk Wood’ was given to me when I was quite young, in Sydney. I didn’t even know what Wales was, let alone anything about Dylan Thomas. It taught me the beginning of my love of English literature.

I left school at 16 but I wish I’d gone to university – I think I would have studied English literature. I had a knack for that. But I don’t think you have the kind of wisdom at 16 to make that decision.

I had the impression from reading English literature that British women were great beauties, and I only had seen Julie Christie, and she was gorgeous and sexy. I don’t know whether it was just my taste, but when I got to London, I went two years without seeing a truly attractive woman. A lot of near misses.

I studied French and English literature because I liked it.

At graduation, I assumed I’d be in publishing, but first I went to England and got a master’s degree in English Literature. And then I came back to New York and had a series of publishing jobs, the way one does.

Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature.

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.

Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New England, and of English literature generally, as of another order. He is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald, the poet-seer.

My mother, with a Master’s in English Literature, taught me to appreciate language and that words matter.

From my earliest days, reading was my passion, and at Cambridge, where I studied English literature, my intellectual life deepened and grew.

I got my degree in philosophy and English literature; those were my main interests.

I graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with an English literature degree and travelled for a year before going to work.

I really liked English literature, a subject I did really well at.