Quotes About Classics

That meant that not only must I cathect myself to the entitled white protagonist but then mourn for the loss of his precious childhood as if it were my own in overrated classics like Catcher in the Rye.

But what came easily to Homer (and to Xenophon, in prose) was no longer easily available to the moderns, who introduced the presence of the representing subject into representation itself (Byron being a prime example in the Zibaldone).

Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)

Dad reads great fat books too, but they're not modern, they're all classics - Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. If we have a look at Dad's book we wonder what the Dickens they're on about and they seem very Hardy, but Dad likes them.

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.

I like to spoof the original Gothic classics, so there is also good dose of comedy in the 'Parasol Protectorate' - giggling readers are good.

Books that have become classics -- books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal -- always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

Negative books can be bestsellers, but seldom classics.

I'm a fan of originals and classics, but I'm also a fan of new ideas.

'The Shining,' 'A Nightmare on Elm Street,' 'Halloween.' Those are the greats.

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.

One result of the book boom was the growth of new publishers, who could use any paper they could find—they often advertised for 'free' supplies—and were not rationed to a fraction of their pre-war consumption. Lacking 'back lists' they specialised in new books and the public found it bewildering that new titles should constantly be published while textbooks and classics remained unobtainable.

Let us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible handwriting….here we have copied out fine passages from the classics;…here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink.

But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.

inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style (which make them, the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shrieking); [...] By bribing a nurse I won access to some files and discovered, with glee, cards calling me "potentially homosexual" and "totally impotent.

I suppose I could still read Virgil or Sophocles with the help of a dictionary, but I do not do so, because it would give me no pleasure

As far back as I can remember, these are the first movies, the Universal horror movies where I knew the title of the film and I also knew the names of the actors in those films.

My husband is a graduate of two Ivy League universities - with a degree in Classics! - and he sounds like a David Mamet character when I hear him on a business call.

In 1984, I returned to Newnham College at Cambridge University to teach after completing my Ph.D. there a couple of years earlier. Almost all of my colleagues in the university's classics department were men, and my office at the all-women's college was in the dorm.

I AM NOT about making movies that would be forgotten. I want to make ONLY timeless classics. I don't care if it takes me ten years

I didn't care for most of the books I was being asked to read in school. I started reading like crazy right after high school when I got a job in a mental hospital. I was working my way through college, and I did a lot of night shifts, and there was nothing to do. So I read like crazy, serious stuff, all the classics.

Juilliard's mission statement is learn about the classics so you can use that as a springboard to anything that comes your way.