Quotes About Classics

In schools—even in good schools, like Exeter—they tend to teach the shorter books by the great authors; at least they begin with those. Thus it was Billy Budd, Sailor that introduced me to Melville, which led me to the library, where I discovered Moby Dick on my own.

One attraction of Latin is that you can immerse yourself in the poems of Horace and Catullus without fretting over how to say, "Have a nice day."

The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they're both about father-son relationships.

It's no more obsolete than the Iliad. I may

So we spent our undergraduate years awash in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse and Middle English, living with Beowulf and Sir Gawain, ... and we were required to pay hardly any attention to the 19th-century novel, and not much to the 18th. As for the 20th century, it might have never arrived. As a friend of mine said, 'They taught us to believe in dragons.

You have to know the classics if you want to cook modern food.

Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

I saw Hamlet Prince of Denmark played; but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age.

Here Greek and Roman find themselves alive along these crowded shelves; and Shakespeare treads again his stage, and Chaucer paints anew his age.

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horror of sordid passion and-if he is lucky enough-know the love of an honest woman.

The power of the Latin classic is in character, that of the Greek is in beauty. Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.

All in all, I was harking back to the Ancient Greeks. When you get old, you always hark back to the Ancient Greeks.

He read through Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, Austen, and Trollope, then moved on to the Continent to read through much of Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert, then fell in love with Tolstoy. His favorite was Goethe; he must have read The Sorrows of Young Werther at

He read through Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, Austen, and Trollope, then moved on to the Continent to read through much of Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert, then fell in love with Tolstoy. His favorite was Goethe; he must have read The Sorrows of Young Werther at least half a dozen times.

Although modern scholars may sneer at medieval latinity, the training produced a world of clerks who could converse at ease in Latin and write it with a fluency and vigor beyond the reach of our Classics majors.

A. B. Guthrie's 1947 novel The Big Sky (even better than its sequel, The Way West, which won the Pulitzer Prize), The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1940), and Jack Schaefer's Shane (1949) were all made into well-regarded movies, but these three classics of Western fiction continue to make for wonderful reading.

Melville's example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference.

Tillie Olsen. James Joyce. Robert Stone. I must have read Updike's Rabbit, Run five times and Bellow's Herzog

One attraction of Latin is that you can immerse yourself in the poems of Horace and Catullus without fretting over how to say, Have a nice day.