Most of the best-known quotes by the British poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge come from his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Kubla Khan (1816). But…
Category: Literature quotes
“England’s green and pleasant land”
If you’re not British, you may only be vaguely aware of the song “Jerusalem.” But the tune and lyrics are very familiar to the people of England. It is England’s…
The secret behind the famous phrase “the heart is a lonely hunter”…
On June 4, 1940, Houghton Mifflin published the first novel by the American writer Carson McCullers, a sensitive story about misfits and social outcasts in a Southern mill town titled…
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., often referred to as Boswell’s Life of Johnson, is one of the most famous biographies ever written and the best known source…
“Coffee, Tea or Me?” – the catchphrase popularized by a hoax based on a joke…
Back in the 1960s, when air travel was more pleasant and our culture was less politically correct, airline stewardesses were hot – at least in terms of their popular image.…
“We don’t need no stinking badges!” – the misquote that became a famous quote
“We don’t need no stinking badges!” is one of the few famous lines that is both a famous quote and a misquote. It’s also the source of many variations about…
“He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.”
In the 1630s, England’s infamous “Star Chamber” (sort of a politically-oriented version of the Spanish Inquisition) banned the printing or sale of “any seditious, scismaticall, or offensive Bookes or Pamphlets.”…
“Never play cards with a man called Doc” — and other advice from Nelson Algren…
The copyright record for the novel A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren says it was copyrighted on May 18, 1956. Traditionally, the copyright date is also a…