Quotessence
Home / Topics / Great Books Quotes

Great Books Quotes

Browse 7 quotes about Great Books.

Great Books Quotes

“Betsy was so full of joy that she had to be alone. She went upstairs to her bedroom and sat down on Uncle Keith's trunk. Behind Tacy's house the sun had set. A wind had sprung up and the trees, their color dimmed, moved under a brooding sky. All the stories she had told Tacy and Tib seemed to be dancing in those trees, along with all the stories she planned to write some day and all the stories she would read at the library. Good stories. Great stories. The classics. Not Rena's novels.”

HopeEmotionFutureAuthorWriterClassicsAspirationsGreat Books
Book:Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown
Create image

“Well, Betsy," he said, "your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith's trunk for a desk. That's fine. You need a desk. I've often noticed how much you like to write. The way you eat up those advertising tablets from the store! I never saw anything like it. I can't understand it though. I never write anything but checks myself. " "Bob!" said Mrs. Ray. "You wrote the most wonderful letters to me before we were married. I still have them, a big bundle of them. Every time I clean house I read them over and cry." "Cry, eh?" said Mr. Ray, grinning. "In spite of what your mother says, Betsy, if you have any talent for writing, it comes from family. Her brother Keith was mighty talented, and maybe you are too. Maybe you're going to be a writer." Betsy was silent, agreeably abashed. "But if you're going to be a writer," he went on, "you've got to read. Good books. Great books. The classics.”

WritingAuthorWriterMothersFathersClassicsEncouragmentGreat Books
Book:Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown
Create image

“This type of translation characteristic of modernity generates in turn its own misunderstanding of tradition. The original locus of that misunderstanding is the kind of introductory Great Books or Humanities course, so often taught in liberal arts colleges, in which, in abstraction from historical context and with all sense of the complexities of linguistic particularity removed by translation, a student moves in rapid succession through Homer, Sophocles, two dialogues of Plato, Virgil, Augustine, the Inferno, Machiavelli, Hamlet [. . .] If one fails to recognize that what this provides is not and cannot be a re-introduction to the culture of past traditions but is a tour through a museum of texts, each rendered contextless and therefore other than its original by being placed on a cultural pedestal, then it is natural enough to suppose that, were we to achieve consensus as to a set of such texts, the reading of them would reading of them would reintegrate modern students into what is thought of as our tradition, that unfortunate fictitious amalgam sometimes known as the "Judeo-Christian tradition" and sometimes as "Western values." The writings of self-proclaimed contemporary conservatives [. . .] turn out to be one more stage in modernity's cultural deformation of our relationship to the past.”

TraditionConservatismWestern ValuesGreat BooksJudeo Christian
Book:Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
Create image