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Harold Bloom

To fall in love with great poetry when you are young is to be awakened to the self's potential, in a way that has little to do, initially, with overt knowing. The self's potential as power involves the self's immortality, not as duration but as the awakening to a knowledge of something in the self that cannot die, because it was never born.

The Western Canon


	French Shakespeare is so delicious an absurdity that one feels an ingrate for not appreciating so comic an invention.

	The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools.

Charles Dickens

Into his handsome face the bitter waters of captivity had worn; but, he covered up their tracks with a determination so strong, that he held the mastery of them even in his sleep. A more remarkable face in its quite, resolute, and guarded struggle with an unseen assailant was not to be beheld in all the wide dominions of sleep, that night.

(A Tale of Two Cities)

Loren Eisley


	As for men, those myriad little detached ponds with their own swarming corpuscular life, what were they but a way that water has of going about beyond the reach of rivers?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

	Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain, and think from thence, but not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual self,--the subtilest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent humanity coordinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has certain observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence, and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part, and starves that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his fitness and strength. But Shakespeare has no peculiarity, no importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities; no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small, subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers.

Nathaniel Hawthorne


	"Why lurkest thou in the corner, lazy one?" said she. "Step forth! Thou hast the world before thee!" (Feathertop)

William Hazlitt

	He (Shelly) takes a subject or a story merely as pegs or loops to hang thought and feeling on; the incidents are trifling, in proportion to his contempt for imposing appearances; the reflections are profound, according to the gravity and aspiring pretensions of the mind.

Thomas Hardy


	Enjoyment was pretty general, and so much the more prevailed in being unhampered by conventional restrictions. Absolute confidence in each other's good opinion begat perfect ease, while the finishing stroke of manner, amounting to a truly princely serenity, was lent to the majority by the absence of any expression or trait denoting that they wished to get on in the world, enlarge their minds, or do any eclipsing thing whatever--which nowadays so generally nips the bloom and bonhomie of all except the two extremes of the social scale. (The Three Strangers)

Seamus Heaney


	Love permits us to walk on air, against our better judgement.

Mark Helprin

Winter's Tale


	No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile.

	These things unfurled before them like flags rolling out on the wind, and seemed to be an important part of the truth if only because they presented again and again the same curves, the same colors, the same flowing symmetries, the same feelings, operations, and acts, all of which, over time, spoke and sang in one language and on song of one central beauty.

	This was by no means the controlled glide that he (Athansor) had habitually used to descend, a fall in which every moment of apprehension had brought a ceasae-fire with gravity, until he and it signed a treaty on the ground. Not at all: it was a flailing, tumbling, sinking rout. He turned in the air, his nostrils flared, his eyes opened wide, and he fell into the lake a hundred feet below the Belevedere, sending up plumes of foaming white water that looked for a moment like wings sprouting from his sides, though, fortunately for him, he was unaware of that irony.

Samuel Johnson

It is from this wide extension of design that so much instruction is derived. It is this which fills the plays of Shakespeare with practical axioms and domestick wisdom. It was said of Euripides, that every verse was a precept and it may be said of Shakespeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and economical prudence. Yet his real power is not shown in the splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue; and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen.

The Preface to Shakespeare


	In tragedy he often writes with great appearance of toil and study, what is written at last with little felicity; but in his comick scenes, he seems to produce without labour, what no labour can improve. In tragedy he is always struggling after some occasion to be comick, but in comedy he seems to repose, or to luxuriate, as in a mode of thinking congenial to his nature. In his tragick scenes there is always something wanting, but his comedy often surpasses expectation or desire. His comedy pleases by the thoughts and the language, and his tragedy for the greater part by incident and action. His tragedy seems to be skil, his comedy to be instinct.

	Shakespeare found (narration) an encumbrance, and instead of lightening it by brevity, endeavoured to recommend it by dignity and splendour.

	The poetical beauties or defects I have not been very diligent to observe. Some plays have more, and some fewer judicial observations, not in proportion to their difference of merit, but because I gave this part of my design to chance and to caprice. The reader, I believe, is seldom pleased to find his opinion anticipated; it is natural to delight more in what we find or make, than in what we receive. Judgement, like otehr faculties, is improved by practice, and its advance ment is hindered by submission to disctatorial decisions, as the memory grows torpid by the use of a table book. Some initiation is however necessary; of all skill, part is infused by precept, and part is obtained by habit; I have therefore shewn so much as may enable the candidate of criticism to discover the rest.

	If my readings are of little value, they have not been ostentatiously displayed or importunately obtrueded. I could have written longer notes, for the art of writing notes is not of difficult attainment. The work is performed, first by railing at the stupidity, negligence, ignorance, and asinine tastelessness of the former editors, and shewing , from all that goes before and all that follows, the inelegance and absurdity of the old reading; then by proposing something, which to superficial readers would seem specious, but which the editor rejects with indignation; then by producing the true reading, with a long paraphrase, and concluding wsith loud acclamations on the discovery, and a sober wish for the advancement and prosperity of genuine criticism.

	It is an unhappy state, in which danger is hid under pleasure. The allurements of emendation are scarcely resistible. Conjecture has all the joy and all the pride of invention, and he that has once started a happy change, is too much delighted to consider what objections may rise against it.

	Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils. Let him, that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give, read every play from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentatrs. When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop at correction or explanation. When his attention is strongly engaged, let it disdain alike to turn aside to the name of Theobald and Pope. Let him read on through brightness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his comprehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness; and read the commentators. Particular passages are cleared by notes, but the general effect of the work is weakened. The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are divereted from the principal subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book, which he has too diligently studied. Parts are not to be examined till the whole has been surveyed; there is a kind of intellectual remoteness necessary for the comprehension of any great work in its full design and its true proportions; a close approach shews the smaller niceties, but the beauty of the whole is discerned no longer.

Jonathan Kozol

Amazing Grace


	It has to take extraordinary self-deceit for people who plant flowers on Park Avenue but pump their sewage into Harlem and transporrt their medical waste, and every other kind of waste that you can think of, to Mott Haven, to imagine that they have the moral standing to be judges of the people that have segregated and concealed. Only a very glazed and clever culture in which social blindness is accepted as a normal state of mind could paossible permit itself this luxury. (Quoting a pastor)

	Do you know what the shortest verse in the Bible is? Jesus wept. (Anthony, 10 years old)

	"How can you know when you're there?" (in heaven) "Something will tell you, 'This is it! Eureka!' If you still feel lonely in your heart, or bitterness, you'll know that you're not there." (Anthony)

Alexander Pope


	How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;

	Not to go back is somewhat to advance, and men must walk, at least, before they dance.

Thomas Pynchon

The Crying of Lot 49


	Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment sh'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the wrld refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.

Philip Roth

The Human Stain


	I know that every mistake a man can make usually has a sexual accelerator.

	The sensory fullness, the copiousness, the abundant--superabundant--detail of life, which is the rhapsody.

	Her undriven, conventional daily demeanor in combination with the intensity of her weekend abandon--all of it subsumed by a physical incandescence, a girlish American flashbulb radiance that was practically voodooish in its power--had achieved a startling supremacy over a will as ruthlessly independent as Coleman's: she had not only severed him from boxing and the combative filial defiance encapsulated in being Silky Silk the undefeated welterweight pro, but had freed him from the desire for anyone else.

	If he wanted this girl for good, then it was boldness that was required now and not an elocutionary snow job, 'a la Clarence Silk.

	He thought the same useless thoughts--useless to a man of no great talent like himself, if not to Sophocles: how accidentally a fate is made...or how accidental it all may seem when it is inescapable.

	Her irreversible hair. You could polish pots with it an no more alter its construction that if it were harvested from the inky depths of the sea, some kind of wiry reef-building organism, a dense living onyx hybrid of coral and shrub, perhaps possessing medicinal properties.

Richard Russo


	To Gary Fisketjon, who has labored over this manuscript so lovingly, I'd attempt to describe my gratitude in words, but then he'd have to edit them, and he's worked too hard already.

George Bernard Shaw


	There is no eminent writer ... whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.

Percy Bysshe Shelly


	She stood beside him like a rainbow braided.

Henry David Thoreau


	In the end, you hit only what you aim at.

Thucydides

	They have the numbers; we, the heights.

Walt Whitman

	After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love and so on--have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear--what remains? Nature remains.