English Major Quotes

“The English major is, first of all, a reader. She's got a book pup-tented in front of her nose many hours a day; her Kindle glows softly late into the night. But there are readers and there are readers. There are people who read to anesthetize themselves—they read to induce a vivid, continuous, and risk-free daydream. They read for the same reason that people grab a glass of chardonnay—to put a light buzz on. The English major reads because, as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough. He reads not to see the world through the eyes of other people but effectively to become other people. What is it like to be John Milton, Jane Austen, Chinua Achebe? What is it like to be them at their best, at the top of their games?”
― Mark Edmundson

“After three years of English at Cambridge, being force-fed literary theory, I was almost convinced that literature was all coded messages about Marxism and the death of the self. I crawled out of the post-structuralist desert thirsty for heroines I could cry and laugh with. I was jaded. I craved trash.”
― Samantha Ellis, How to Be a Heroine

“I wished I hadn’t majored in women filling their pockets with stones and sticking their heads into ovens.

Maybe tomorrow the pinhole would widen and I would want to be a marine biologist.”
― Kat Clark

“I began to parse the sentence. This is what English majors do. It's what we're trained to do. We don't know how to do anything else, except drive cabs.”
― Gary Reilly, The Heart of Darkness Club

“I will find you another long-forgotten Queen Mab poem in no time. Depend on it. I refuse to let Cody or anyone else know more about English Literature than me. So calm yourself, Elfish, and let an expert take over.”
― Martin Millar, Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving

“I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:
The past, present, and future walk into a bar—it was tense.”
― Kelli Russell Agodon, Hourglass Museum

“Quotation is a noun. Quote is a verb.”
― Eusebius Clay

“You going back?' he asks.
'Where?'
'College,' he says. 'You plan on going back?'
And before she can think of a proper answer, she blurts out the first thing that comes to mind:
'Why would I?'
'To finish your degree,' he says.
'Yeah, I get it,' she says. 'But—why?'
'To get a better job?'
'I’m okay with this one,' she says.
'Yeah,' he says, shifting in his seat again. 'But—I don’t know. Can’t you make more money?'
'Linus,' she says, leveling her eyes at him. 'I was an English major.”
― Patrick Anderson Jr., Quarter Life Crisis

“To such, however, as do not choose to go so far back into these things, I can give no better advice, than that they skip over the remaining parts of this chapter; for I declare before-hand, 'tis wrote only for the curious and inquisitive.”
― Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

“Ed was meant to be on kid duty while she hosted the book club. He'd read the book, but he didn't want to join the club. He said the idea of book clubs brought back horrible memories of pretentious classmates in English Lit. 'If anyone uses the phrases "marvelous imagery" or "narrative arc", slap them for me,' he'd said.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“But I think maybe every job is a waste of an English degree.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“It was possible to explore the 'great tradition' of the English novel and believe that in doing so you were addressing questions of fundamental value -- questions which were of vital relevance to the lives of men and women wasted in fruitless labour in the factories of industrial capitalism. But it was also conceivable that you were destructively cutting yourself off from such men and women, who might be a little slow to recognize how a poetic enjambement enacted a movement of physical balancing.”
― Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

“Cath didn't have any English classes this semester, and she was thinking about changing her major. Or maybe she'd just change her concentration from Creative Writing to Renaissance Lit; that would be useful in the real world, a head full of sonnets and Christ imagery. If you study something that nobody cares about, does that mean everyone will leave you alone?”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“He's a cocky SOB. He knew the Nick Adams Stories. Probably a frustrated English major who graduated from college qualified to drive a cab.”
― Peter Heller, Celine