Classics Curriculum Quotes

“All this new stuff goes on top
turn it over, turn it over
wait and water down
from the dark bottom
turn it inside out
let it spread through
Sift down even.
Watch it sprout.

A mind like compost.”
― Gary Snyder

“Classics aren't books that are read for pleasure. Classics are books that are imposed on unwilling students, books that are subjected to analyses of "levels of significance" and other blatt, books that are dead.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“Prophet may you be!
If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth,
when time is old and hath forgot itself,
when waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy,
and blind oblivion swallowed cities up,
and mighty states characterless are grated
to dusty nothing, yet let memory,
from false to false, among false maids in love,
upbraid my falsehood!”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“A book isn't a single, static thing with one unarguable meaning. Each reader who comes to it brings his own special knowledge, habits and attitudes. Each reader reads a different book. Each reader imagines a different story.
A few years ago, for instance, a friend of my mother's sent me a copy of a test on Rite of Passage that she had given her students. The first question read: "True or False? The theme of Rite of Passage is..." I can't tell you what the presumed themed was, but I can tell you that I didn't recognize it. Beads of sweat leaped out of my forehead. After two more questions, I had to put the test aside. I didn't know the "right" answers.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

“One more thing, gentlemen, before I quit. Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal, a phrase that the Yankees and the distaff side of the Executive branch in Washington are fond of hurling at us. There is a tendency in this year of grace, 1935, for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious—because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe—some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they’re born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies
make better cakes than others—some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men.”
― Harper Lee To Kill A Mockingbird

“I would have got past Mr. Rochester's chamber without pause; but my heart momentarily stopping its beat at that threshold, my foot was forced to stop also.  No sleep was there: the inmate was walking restlessly from wall to wall; and again and again he sighed while I listened.  There was a heaven-a temporary heaven-in this room for me if I chose.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“You are a fool to read classics because you are told to and not because you like them.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“Rereading does not lend itself to imperialistic interpretations that assume command of textual territory in the name of some over-riding truth. On the contrary, rereading insists on multiplicity of meaning, predicted as it is on awareness of the different revelations implicit in different encounters with a single book. (page 84)”
― Patricia Meyer Spacks, On Rereading

“...rereading works that I originally read, for pleasure, in the excited atmosphere of contemporaneity, [I] have reread them purposefully to assess their power, given the passage of time. (pg. 127)”
― Patricia Meyer Spacks, On Rereading