Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I asked Agamemnon plainly about Iphigenia; he wept. Not as one cries out of pain, but out of fear. Out of weakness.
Thrashing is not the most noticeably awful of disappointments. Not to have attempted is the genuine disappointment.
At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.
Learning to sing one's own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own's voices, is also the goal of any writer.
The biographer who writes the life of his subjects self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.
Those of our writers who have possessed a vivid personal talent have been paralyzed by a want of social background.
Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
Agitation is that part of our intellectual life where vitality results; there ideas are born, breed and bring forth.
The biographer who writes the life of his subject's self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.
We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.
As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith
The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
My mother is the source of my unease in the world and thus the only person who can make me feel at home in the world.
We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.
It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.
The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.
In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.
If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.
If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?
The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
There's something stubborn about families, unhappy ones in particular: they outlive themselves, and then they live on.
Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.
Any biographer must of necessity become a pilgrim a peripatetic, obsessed literary pilgrim, a traveler with four eyes.
Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.
Children's books are written for upbringing...but upbringing is a great thing; it decides the fate of the human being.
We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
Much later I realized that a person's attitude to pain reveals more about his future than almost any other sign I know.
So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.
Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.
I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.
The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.
Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading.
Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.
The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity.
The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding
I have lots of things that aren't so old that I value, such as a copy of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," which he signed for me.
Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.
For it is characteristic of true simplicity that there may radiate from its utmost directness a good many glinting things.
I'm sorry, I'm absolutely convinced that there is at the moment no realistic prospect for very much hope in human affairs.
I bargained with Life for a penny, And Life would pay no more, However I begged at evening When I counted my scanty store.
In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.
Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.
All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object.
Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.
Emily Dickinson liked to shock people. She liked to break rules. There was a kind of rebellious freedom in her inner world.