Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men.
Shakespeare is universal.
Literature is achieved anxiety.
Real reading is a lonely activity.
There is no method except yourself.
Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.
The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?
Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.
To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.
To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.
It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.
The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.
The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.
I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well.
I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.
Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.
Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.
It is by extending oneself, by exercising some capacity previously unused that you come to a better knowledge of your own potential.
I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.
What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.
I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths.
Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.
Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.
Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.
Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates.
We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.
I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.
I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.
If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.
Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.
The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.
