Louis Menand famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.
-- Louis Menand

#Coins #Smooth #Circulation
We have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other people's cultures and permitting ourselves to accept that there is more than one version of reality.
-- Louis Menand

#Reality #People #Culture
Most Americans who made it past the fourth grade have a pretty good idea who Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr., were. Not many Americans have even heard of Alice Paul, Howard W. Smith, and Martha Griffiths. But they played almost as big a role in the history of womenâ€™s rights as Marshall and King played in the history of civil rights for African-Americans. They gave women the handle to the door to economic opportunity, and nearly all the gains women have made in that sphere since the nineteen-sixties were made because of what they did.
-- Louis Menand

#Kings #Past #Opportunity
A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of becoming a journalist.
-- Louis Menand

#Risk #Curiosity #Requirements
There are limits, after all, to the idea of limits.
-- Louis Menand

#Ideas #Limits
Itâ€™s all in the genesâ€: an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are. Why should someone feel unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living in the freest and most prosperous nation on earth? It canâ€™t be the system! There must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere.
-- Louis Menand

#Unhappy #Doe #Earth
Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.
-- Louis Menand

#Writing #Sound #Timing
Diminished circumstances had no effect on his sense of what was honorable: after The Spectator sent him a check for a piece it had accepted but was unable to run for a lack of space, he refused to write for the magazine again.
-- Louis Menand

#Running #Writing #Space
If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky.
-- Louis Menand

#Reality #Slinkies #Staircases
One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.
-- Louis Menand

#Writing #Oddities #Ideas
It’s all in the genes”: an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are. Why should someone feel unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living in the freest and most prosperous nation on earth? It can’t be the system! There must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere.
-- Louis Menand

#Unhappy #Doe #Earth
Just in higher education alone, more people go to college now, by enormous amounts, than went to college in the '50's and '60's. So that represents a whole new literate public that's a consumer of literature, of news, of print, of, you know, opinion. And that's a bigger audience and much more diverse audience than it used to be.
-- Louis Menand

#College #People #News
The short story is not as restrictive as the sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. ...at the end there has to be the literary equivalent of the magician's puff of smoke, an outcome that is both startling and anticipated.
-- Louis Menand

#Puff #Stories #Outcomes
It's difficult to get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as teaching assistants or instructors by their schools, by their schools where they're graduate students, and that does become exploitative eventually because they're very cheap labor and there's a way in which in it's not in the institution's interest to give them a degree if they can continue to employ them, I don't think anybody thinks that way, but effectively that's the way the system is starting to work.
-- Louis Menand

#Jobs #Teaching #School
You want diversity in any intellectual organization. I mean, that's how good ideas arise.
-- Louis Menand

#Mean #Organization #Ideas
I think at a place like Harvard, our experience, I was involved with, at various stages, in trying to implement a new general education curriculum, our experience was that Harvard's all about specialization, that's not just true of the professori, it's also true of a lot of the undergraduates, too, and they come, they kind of know what they want to do, they select it because they have a strong aptitude for something in particular.
-- Louis Menand

#Strong #Thinking #Trying
I don't really usually push an agenda, and I don't feel that my main job is to persuade people of something. My main job is to help them think about something.
-- Louis Menand

#Jobs #Thinking #People
I suppose everybody does get attached to characters whether in movies or in stories, but I think that's part of the reason you get involved with literature is because there's somebody that grabs you about it and then you want to figure out why.
-- Louis Menand

#Character #Thinking #Doe
For the kind of places I've written for and the kind of writing that I've done, the general way to think about your audience is to think about somebody who's like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.
-- Louis Menand

#Writing #Thinking #Discipline
When I was young, I went to college, had a teacher who was, had been a student of Trilling's at Columbia, this was in California. And he, I started reading him around that time, and then I went to Columbia as well, Trilling was still teaching there, I took a course with him. He was not a great teacher, but he was, when I was younger, he was a good model for the kind of criticism I wanted to do, because he thought very dialectically.
-- Louis Menand

#Teacher #Teaching #Reading
Obviously input is helpful to faculty in trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it's the faculty's job to know what students need to know. Make a decision about it and present it.
-- Louis Menand

#Jobs #Decision #Trying
The difficulty with coming up with a curriculum is mainly that faculty aren't trained to think in terms of general education. They're trained to think in terms of their own discipline, or their specialty.
-- Louis Menand

#Thinking #Discipline #Curriculum
Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.
-- Louis Menand

#Views #Medicine #Political
Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It's quotable because it's been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority.
-- Louis Menand

#Giving #Authority #Circulation
I think in general there's no point in going into a field like English literature if you're not going to have fun with it.
-- Louis Menand

#Fun #Thinking #Literature

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