Anthony M. Esolen Quotes

For those of you who may be homeschooled: high school is that four-year asylum where they put teenagers because we have no idea what else to do with them.

~ Anthony M. Esolen

[Today's high schoolers are required to read] a couple of Shakespeare plays...the couple of Shakespeare plays function as an inoculation – that is, you get exposed to 'half-dead Shakespeare virus', and it keeps you from ever loving Shakespeare again, your whole life long. It would be much better if they didn't do that at all!Because [the students] have no linguistic preparation for it, and no cultural or historical preparation for it. They've not been reading English poetry, so the language strikes them as completely bizarre […] and they have no historical place to put it, so they don't know what's going on. All they know is that they're 'supposed to like it'.

~ Anthony M. Esolen

The first good news for all of us, the first joyful story of our lives, is that there is a story at all, and an Author who has loved us into being.

~ Anthony M. Esolen

If we loved children, we would have a few. If we had them, we would want them as children, and would love the wonder with which they behold the world, and would hope some of it might open our eyes a little. We would love their games, and would want to play them once in a while, stirring in ourselves those memories of play that no one regrets, and that are almost the only things an old man can look back on with complete satisfaction. We would want children tagging along after us, or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do.

~ Anthony M. Esolen

Many of the greatest books are like a forest. “The best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost.

~ Anthony M. Esolen

For the first time in human history, most people are doing things that could never interest a child enough to want to tag along. That says less about the child than about us.

~ Anthony M. Esolen

How decisive for the Christian educator, or for any educator of good will, is the revelation that man is made in the image and likeness of the three-Personed God? That is like asking what difference it will make to us if we keep in mind that a human being is made not for the processing of data, but for wisdom; not for the utilitarian satisfaction of appetite, but for love; not for the domination of nature, but for participation in it; not for the autonomy of an isolated self, but for communion.

~ Anthony M. Esolen

And those characters [in a fairy tale] dwell in a moral world, whose laws are as clear as the law of gravity. That too is a great advantage of the folk tale. It is not a failure of imagination to see the sky blue. It is a failure rather to be weary of its being blue- and not to notice how blue it is. And appreciation of the subtler colors of the sky will come later. In the folk tale, good is good and evil is evil, and the former will triumph and later will fail. This is not the result of the imaginative quest. It is rather its principle and foundation. It is what will enable the child later on to understand Macbeth, or Don Quixote, or David Copperfield.

~ Anthony M. Esolen

We would – or at least we should – take upon ourselves the ultimate task of our poet: to seek the face of God.

~ Anthony M. Esolen

Fairy tales and folk tales are for children and childlike people, not because they are little and inconsequential, but because they are as enormous as life itself.

~ Anthony M. Esolen

You democratize heroism. Everybody is a hero, and simply for doing (and often not well at that) the ordinary tasks of living as a half-decent person. Does your mother fix you breakfast? She is a hero. Does your father visit you every weekend without fail? A hero. Does your teacher mark your papers faithfully when you make a mistake? Unexampled heroism, that. If everyone is a hero, then no one is a hero; and genuine heroes will go unnoticed in all the mindless self-congratulation.

~ Anthony M. Esolen