Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

I cannot understate the ability to handle classical texts such as Shakespeare.

The society Shakespeare knew was heading for tremendous change, and he seems to have recognized that and written about it in a coded way. I understand those codes, I think.

I'm an old English major from way back, so I do have fun tearing apart texts and trying to find the hidden secrets and the subtexts in there.

I do tend to be an analyzer. I'm an old English major from way back, so I do have fun tearing apart texts and trying to find the hidden secrets and the subtexts in there.

Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.

In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.

Listen you have to read a book three times before you know it.

I do not remember a time since I have been capable of loving books that I have not loved Shakespeare.

We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable.

I am both a public and a private school boy myself, having always changed schools just as the class in English in the new school was taking up Silas Marner, with the result that it was the only book in the English language that I knew until I was eighteen--but, boy, did I know Silas Marner!

I think there's a whole book being written about it in the UK. I don't know if you can get it here. It's about all the hidden messages and meetings in this and the fact that it is about women and the fact that this cave is full of blood and all this kind of stuff. And when I was making it, I didn't make it with that specifically in mind, but I always had it in the back of mind and I thought, 'Let's just throw it in there and see what people make of it.' And people seem to be making quite a lot of it. So I don't want to spell it out or say this, that or the other.

If one of my kids reads a book for school and I can have a conversation with her about the book and I sense that she gets what the book is about, then it doesn't really matter to me if she gets an A on the paper.

The mission of a great school is not to cram you with facts so that you can regurgitate them...This gives many boys such a distaste for learning that they never read another book as long as they live. No, the mission is to inspire you with a taste for scholarship - a taste which will last you all your life.

I think it's always funny when you see kids do Shakespeare. When I was at school, I was in Hamlet. I played Claudius, who's supposed to be a 60-year-old man, and I was like 18. It's inherently ridiculous seeing 18-year-old boys with gray beards. That's always funny.

I think working on Shakespeare was a big part of my time at drama school. I'm so glad that I got to know Shakespeare and got a chance to play great parts in Shakespeare, because it really teaches you - or taught me, anyway - everything.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.

I started understanding William Blake and George Orwell more and more. It's amazing how we go to school when we're so young, read all of these books, just trying to memorize them. When you start to live, you don't have to memorize anything.

Who cares what the color means? How do you know what he meant to say? I mean, did he leave another book called "Symbolism in My Books?" If he didn't, then you could just be making all of this up. Does anyone really think this guy sat down and stuck all kinds of hidden meanings into his story? It's just a story.... But I think you are making all of this symbolism stuff up. I don't believe any of it.

The worst letters come from retired high school English teachers. They will literally take a book and pick it to pieces and send me 14 pages of notes.

The first of the Trainspotting crew to die. Out of the five of them like, Begbie, Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and [Margaret] Thatcher. Who'd have thunk she'd have been the first to go? She was the invisible author of the book, really. She created the conditions and the hubris whereby that whole culture flourished.

The gender inequality in book reviewing isn't getting better. Male authors get the majority of review coverage, and male reviewers do most of the reviewing. It's kind of devastating.

There's a great book about that, "The Breaking Point" by Stephen Koch . It won't improve your opinion of [Ernest] Hemingway.

In spite of Jean-Jacques and his school, men are not everywhere born free, any more than they are everywhere in chains, unless these be of their own individual making.

I didn't really get into boys until my junior year of high school, when I had my first boyfriend. But for the most part I was always playing sports, so I was too busy for them!

Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.