The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Matthew Pearl

My high school English teacher in junior year, Dr. Robert Parsons, assigned us some Poe stories, including ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Purloined Letter.’ Being an animal person, I had trouble with ‘The Black Cat!’ I got hooked instead by ‘The Purloined Letter,’ a Poe story with detective C. Auguste Dupin.

School, Animal, Black

When it comes to referring to Dickens’s life, performing plays with your nine children for friends and family during Christmas is Dickensian.

Life, Family, Children

exaggeration is the octopus of the English language

language, octopus

A man was leaning idly against an elm. … The man, who towered over the poet even at his slanting angle, too old for a student and too worn for a faculty member, stared at him with the familiar, insatiable gleam of the literary admirer.

These writers take the essence of every person around them, turn them into books and stories without permission or even a simple thank-you, and want all the credit and glory for themselves.

storytelling, writers

Books inspire a man to embrace the world or flee it. They start wars and end them. They make the men and women who write and publish them vast fortunes, and nearly as quickly can drive them into madness and despair. Stay away from what you do not fathom from now on…

books-influence, inspiration, inspire, writers

A man’s library opens up his character to the world.

Avoid the Holy Grail, the heroic journeys, the pursuit of a legend–that is not the life of the bookaneer, who must keep his eyes on the ground while other book people live by dreaming.

dreaming, heroic, holy-grail

People hate the idea of politicians, you see, but love the idea of authors, at least until they meet one.

Though an angel should write, still ’tis devils must print

devil, printing

It is not when a man is at the end of his life, but when a man is at the end of his profession, that his soul shows itself.

Believe that when I am at once a man’s friend I am always so-nor is it so very hard to bring me to it. And though a man may enjoy himself in being my enemy, he cannot make me HIS for longer than I wish. Good afternoon.” Lowell had a way of leaving a conversation with the other person needing more from him.

enemy, friendship