When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, one that expects no liberation from liberation.
Infinite knowledge can never wonder. All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance.
Leggiamo per porre rimedio alla nostra solitudine, anche se poi, di fatto, la nostra solitudine cresce parallelamente all'aumentare e all'approfondirsi delle nostre letture. Non riuscirei proprio a co...
Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider.
Originality must compound with inheritance.
Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, tuned the English tongue.
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.
Shakespeare will not make us better and will not make us worse, but he may allow us to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves.
To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory pipe dreams is right also.
Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God.
The inventor knows HOW to borrow.
Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.
The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.
Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for transport.
I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen's work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without...
One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncras...
The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.
Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.
Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.
According to the myth, Prometheus steal fire to free us; Iago steals us as fresh fodder for the fire.
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