Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.
[Lear] is the universal image of the unwisdom and destructiveness of paternal love at its most ineffectual, implacably persuaded of its own benignity, totally devoid of self-knowledge, and careening o...
Don’t be looking for trifles, Señor Don Quixote, or expect things to be impossibly perfect. Are not a thousand comedies performed almost every day that are full of inaccuracies and absurdities, yet th...
I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.
Jesus is present only as a supreme representation of suffering and change, one that Shakespeare (in his dangerous era) shrewdly and invariably avoided.
Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about...
Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human.
But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives a...
We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and ot...
American Religionists, when I questioned them, frequently said that falling in love was affirming again Christ’s love for each of them.
Oscar Wilde’s beautiful untrue things that save the imagination from falling into careless habits of accuracy.
The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aest...
The tragic sense of life in Don Quixote is also the faith of Moby Dick. Ahab is a monomaniac; so is the kindlier Quixote, but both are tormented idealists who seek justice in human terms, not as theoc...
What could Yeshua of Nazareth have made of Martin Luther's outburst Death to the Law! which in many German Lutherans who served Hitler became Death to the Jews! The Germans would not have crucified Je...
The representation of human character and personality remains always the supreme literary value, whether in drama, lyric or narrative. I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own...
Hope and joy, however irrational, are stronger than dispair, and ultimately more pernicious.
Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.
We read, I think, to repair our solitude, though pragmatically the better we read, the more solitary we become.
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