I was there to get a Ph.D. in English literature. That's not true. I was there to read a lot of books and to discuss them with bright, insightful, book-loving people, an expectation that I pretty quickly learned was about as silly as it could be. Certainly there were other people who loved books, I'm sure there were, but whoever had notified them ahead of time that loving books was not the point, was, in fact, a hopelessly counterproductive and naive approach to the study of literature, neglected to notify me. It turned out that the point was to dissect a book like a fetal pig in biology class or to break its back with a single sentence or to bust it open like a milkweek pod and say, "See? All along it was only fluff, " and then scatter it into oblivion with one tiny breath. Anonymous
About This Quote

I was at a school of education that was a real time capsule of a certain era. It was a place where you could get a Ph.D. in English literature from the '60s, with all the books from the '60s, and the '60s textbooks for kids who didn't read yet, all of which I had to read for my dissertation.

Source: Belong To Me

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