A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.
We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It’s just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.
Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.
Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.
This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it still with us.
We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them.
Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
Even the human heart is slightly left of centre.
The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time.
Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading.
In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs.
War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.
The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: The most conscientous student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.
Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.
The bedrock of doubt is the total nothingness of death. Death is a leveler, not because everybody dies, but because nobody understands what death means.
The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.
The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for “literalists,” becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy.