The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.
We’ll try this first. If it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else. That’s life, isn’t it?
Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy.
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.
Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike.
We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.
People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I.
Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don’t see any way of getting beyond those prophecies.
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.
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.
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.
Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?
More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men.
What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism – which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people – is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.
What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.
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.