David Shields Quotes
Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.
David Shields
Quotes to Explore
-
After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad's an English professor. After a year there, I was like, 'Jesus. I don't want to do this. I don't want to be in the library.' So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it.
Nathaniel Philbrick
-
As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.
Nathaniel Philbrick
-
The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.
Nathan Myhrvold
-
I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express that.
J. M. G. Le Clezio
-
There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.
J. M. Coetzee
-
I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.
E. B. White
-
Journalism students need to understand it and need a solid background in the liberal arts, in sociology, economics, literature and language, because they won't get it later on.
Harrison Salisbury
-
So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.
E. O. Wilson
-
I'm a big reader, so when I was in 'Pride and Prejudice,' or, like, in Poirots and Marples, those are all books that I loved, and so it was really exciting for me to inhabit characters from literature that I knew and recognized.
Talulah Riley
-
When I first stepped into literature twenty-five years ago, I wanted to work on behalf of the oppressed, the working masses, and it seemed to me, mistakenly, that I would not find them among the Jews.
S. Ansky
-
The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.
W. G. Sebald
-
Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
F. Sionil Jose
-
As a writer, I live in the world of literature and ideas, but I entered that world as an emigre from a medieval fiefdom, the sports world of Michigan.
Max Apple
-
One of the great events in my life was my first meeting with Edison. This wonderful man, who had received no scientific training, yet had accomplished so much, filled me with amazement. I felt that the time I had spent studying languages, literature and art was wasted; though later, of course, I learned this was not so.
Nikola Tesla
-
I like a novel to have a certain amount of dead time and filler - unremarkable scenery, descriptions of getting from point A to point B, dialogue in which not much is said - in between the parts that are electric. With a long work that you don't read in one sitting, I think that makes for the best reading experience.
Elif Batuman
-
A hundred thousand men were ledBy one calf near three centuries dead;They followed still his crooked wayAnd lost a hundred years a day;For thus such reverence is lentTo well-established precedent.
Sam Walter Foss
-
I'm a cold winter morning, y'all Summer's Eve.
Ka
-
Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.
David Shields
