Matthew Pearl Quotes

I love to both give and receive very old books.

I read Shakespeare when I was 14 because it's what we were taught.

My grandfather had a proper bookcase of egghead books, and he gave them to me in alphabetical order. So we moved from Aeschylus to the Brontas, and I can still remember the great relief of going from the dipus cycle to Jane Eyre.

At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes.

My mother used to take my brother and me to get any books we wanted, but they were second hand books published in the '30s and '40s. I liked scary books.

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.

I hated the fact that I had to read 'Moby-Dick' as a senior in high school.

When I was young, I colored in the line drawings in vintage editions of the Oz books that had been handed down through generations in my family. This was a bad thing to do.

I think Jane Austen is like Shakespeare, in a slightly different way. I think people will continue to revisit these stories because they remain relevant, regardless of how you do them.

Shakespeare is still Shakespeare because story rules.

I made use of the college library by borrowing books other than scientific books, such as all of the plays by George Bernard Shaw, the writing of Edgar Allan Poe. The college library helped me to develop a broader aspect on life.

A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and _The Last Whole Earth Catalog_.

"Literature" is written material that, 100 years after the death of the author, is forced upon high school students.

Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces.

I read *old* novels. The reason is simple. I prefer proper endings.

All those moments, those memories. Everything that we are, compressed in just two or three kilos of paper — the weight of a human heart.

If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them.

My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. he was left handed. The thing that was descriptive about it though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up to bat

Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.

Even if we no longer have much in common, we would have always had the past, which, in some ways, is just as important as the present or future. It is where we come from, what makes us who we are.

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 horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman.

I have a beautiful address book a friend gave me in 1966. I literally cannot open it again. Ever. It sits on the shelf with over a hundred names crossed out. What is there to say? There are no words. I'll never understand why it happened to us.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing.

Clothing is . . . an exercise in memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that. They are like signposts in the search for the past.