English Literature Quotes

...the wise words of a friend and guide rang in my head. 'How would you distinguish a true servant of God from a traitor?...You should take especial notice of how a person speaks, not of other things, but of God.

~ Harry Blamires

وإذا أنْتَ أثْبَتتَ أنَّ الكَلْبَ أوْفى مِنْكَ، فَأنا ما زِلْتُ إنْسانًاAnd if you have proven that dog is more loyal than you, I am still human

~ Khaled Ibrahim

English is the language through which I reach hearts from various corners of the world. English is the language through which I flirt with my species. English is the language through which I make my species think.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The most difficult thing for a wise woman to do is to pretend to be a foolish one.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

The arts that have escaped [uniformity] best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.

~ Oscar Wilde

What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.

~ Margaret Atwood

Ninety-nine per cent of traditional English literature concerns people who never have to worry about money at all. We always seem to be watching or reading about emotional crises among folk who live in a world of great fortune both in matters of luck and money; stories and fantasies about rock stars and film stars, sporting millionaires and models; jet-setting members of the aristocracy and international financiers.

~ James Kelman

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more priviledged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Now why should that man have fainted? But he did,and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

If Bengali is my mother, then English is my father and friend.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The time is ripe for young Indian authors writing in the English language.

~ Anurag Shourie

When the devout religion of mine eyeMaintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires,And these, who, often drowned, could never die,Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars!One fairer than my love? The all-seeing sunNe'er saw her match since first the world begun.

~ William Shakespeare

Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as whenThe bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,Her ashes new-create another heirAs great in admiration as herself.

~ William Shakespeare

In my mind's eye

~ William Shakespeare

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Libraries are always bigger on the inside because every book has an entire word inside of it.

~ Robert Arger

Here rests his head upon the lap of earthA youth to fortune and to fame unknown.Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,And Melancholy marked him for her own.

~ Thomas Gray