Literary Critics

"Are sorrows hard to bear,—the ruin Of flowers, the rotting of red fruit, A love’s decease, a life’s undoing, And summer slain, and song-birds mute, And skies of snow and bitter air? These things, you deem, are hard to bear.But ah, the burden, the delight Of dreadful joys! Noon opening wide, Golden and great; the gulfs of night, Fair deaths, and rent veils cast aside, Strong soul to strong soul rendered up, And silence filling like a cup."

"I'm a man more dined against than dining."

"Buggery was invented to fill that awkward hour between evensong and cocktails."

"Splendid couple—slept with both of them."

"Though like Our Lord and Socrates he does not publish much, he thinks and says a great deal and has had an enormous influence on our times"

"Rufus Norris's ambitious production is not about safety and is not for the faint-hearted. He is more interested in the darker, distressing aspects of fairytale than in cheap Christmas gags. As the story unfolds, it becomes more gruesome, involving a horrifying ogre (congratulations to Nicholas Beveney's hairy monster) and a magnificent ogress (Daniel Cerqueira) who becomes, in this version, Sleeping Beauty's mother-in-law and tries to eat her own grandchildren. I suspect the younger members of the audience weren't half as troubled as I was."

"Fiona Shaw, in Jonathan Miller's production, is the best shrew I have seen. She starts off in a mustard yellow dress with a mustard sharp tongue and suitably pointed features screwed up into a vexed expression. She is given to blood-curdling yells, intimidating her family, hand-cuffing her sister and chopping bits off her ginger plait when particularly aggravated. She is a pain to behold and to hear."

"I used to joke about having a "bee in my Barnet," now I am more likely to bring news about bees in Barnet."

"Here is the theory invented by Tocqueville. ... The lighter a yoke, the more it seems insupportable; what exasperates is not the crushing burden but the impediment; what inspires to revolt is not oppression but humiliation. The French of 1789 were incensed against the nobles because they were almost the equals of the nobles; it is the slight difference that can be appreciated, and what can be appreciated that counts. The eighteenth-century middle class was rich, in a position to fill almost any employment, almost as powerful as the nobility. It was exasperated by this “almost” and stimulated by the proximity of its goal; impatience is always provoked by the final strides."

"Baudelaire had supper at the table next to ours. He was without a cravat, his shirt open at the neck and his head shaved, just as if he were to be guillotined. A single affectation: his little hands washed and cared for, the nails kept scrupulously clean. The face of a maniac, a voice that cuts like a knife, and a precise elocution that tries to copy Saint-Just and succeeds."

"Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization."

"We asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality in which we live, there are classes unworthy the notice of the author and the reader, misfortunes too lowly, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too commonplace in the terror they inspire."

"She was, so to speak, an impersonal creature, because of her great heart; a woman who did not belong to herself: God seemed to have made her only to give her to others."

"The Sense of an Ending" is a brief history of the paradigm and some of its variations. Kermode's book is an impressively learned, eloquent and brilliant defense of a non-schismatic view of human time. "At some very low level"- biological or psychological- "we all share certain fictions about time, and they testify to the continuity of what is called human nature." Man's position existentially is intermediary; he is born and dies "in the middle of things." What Kermode calls "fictions" (in both literature and the rest of life) are those "coherent patterns" which, by providing or implying an ending, "make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle." These temporal fictions "humanize the common death" and allow us to coexist with temporal chaos."

"[A]lthough for us the End has perhaps lost its naive imminence, its shadow still lies on the crises of our fictions; we may speak of it as immanent."

"They [Millenarians] had, as Bultmann puts it, abolished history in favour of eschatology; but it was a premature abolition. Already in St. Paul and St. John there is a tendency to conceive of the End as happening at every moment; this is the moment when the modern concept of crisis was born - St. John puns on the Greek word, which means both 'judgment' and 'separation.' ...'In the sacramental church,' says Bultmann, 'eschatology is not abandoned but is neutralized in so far as the powers of the beyond are already working in the present.' No longer imminent, the End is immanent. So that it is not merely the remnant of time that has eschatological import; the whole of history, and the progress of the individual life, have it also, as a benefaction from the End, now immanent."

"[E]schatology is stretched over the whole of history, the End is present in every moment, the types always relevant."

"We project ourselves–a small, humble, elect perhaps–past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle..."

"И как пчелы в улье опустелом Дурно пахнут мертвые слова."

"И вам чужд тот безумный охотник, кто взойдя на нагую скалу — в пьяном счастье в тоске безотчетной прямо в солнце пускает стрелу."

"Солнце, сожги настоящее Во имя грядущего, Но помилуй прошедшее!"

"Agendas do not have to melt together or shed their distinctness or lose their efficacy when they “correspond or get along.” They do not have to align, at all. [...] There is no time, and there is so much work to be done."

"A politics of solidarity demands that my ally’s needs are my own."

"There is no such thing as a race without its own cooking. Or even without its daily bread. (43)"

"Is the pleasure of remembering somehow debilitating? Maybe memory gets weakened by being handled and stretched so much. Memories return so often and we stay hooked onto some event or other... (37)"

"A dearth in published literature exists despite the multitude of noteworthy female authors who share the Latin American Jewish identity; writers like Angelina Muñiz, Clarice Lispector, and Margo Glantz. The long-time omission of these authors from anthologies likely reflects how they have historically been afforded less recognition and renown than their male counterparts."

"Along with a funny and enchanting memoir of her Jewish family's migration to Mexico, Margo Glantz has given us in The Family Tree an exploration of what it means to belong to two worlds and how it can enrich our own identity if both of these worlds intertwine."

"All of us, no matter whether noble or not, have our own family trees. (Prologue)"

"Living with someone probably means losing part of your own identity. Living with someone contaminates (36)"

"Perhaps what attracts me about my Jewish past and present is an awareness of its vividness, its colour and its grotesqueness, the same awareness that makes real Jews a minor race with a major sense of humour, with their ordinary cruelty, their unfortunate tenderness and their occasional shamelessness. (Prologue)"

"In Y por mirarlo todo, nada veía, I tried to show how the meaningless proliferation of news and the almost endemic impossibility of ranking and practicing irony contaminate and disable us in our efforts to keep a healthy mental distance."

"Zoom and other outlets deform our images, making us lose our actual bodies, and with the possibility of contacting each other this way—we become holograms, or ghosts like Justine from Bioy Casares’s great novel, The Invention of Morel."

"my brother-in-law says I don't seem Jewish, because Jews, like our first cousins the Arabs, hate images. So everything is mine and yet it isn't, and I look Jewish and I don't and that is why I am writing this- my family history, the story of my own family tree. (Prologue)"

"Time is a space marked out and filled with the ceaseless chanting of prayers by which a devout Jew measures his life."

"One of the first things that occurs in totalitarian regimes, as we saw with research, such as Hitler and Stalin et al., is the act of abhorring culture, of banning and burning books."

"It doesn't matter much whether you're a Jew or not, what matters is whether you're willing to fight against the herd instinct. (13)"

"Womanism is black-centred; it is accommodationist. It believes in the freedom and independence of women like feminism; unlike radical feminism, it wants meaningful union between black women and black men and black children and will see to it that men begin to change from their sexist stand. It is also interested in communal well-being."

"As black, they themselves suffered as victims of a white patriarchal culture, as women, they also face racial, sexual harassment, and class discrimination by white men. Within the framework, most of the black women writers...deal mainly with the black woman as a victim of black patriarchy"

"J. C. L. Simondo de' Sismondi, History of the French, vol. V, for Nicolò Bettoni, Milan, C.E.1823."

"J. C. L. Simondo de' Sismondi, History of the French, vol. XII, Swiss typography, Capolago, C.E.1838."

"To G. C. Sismodo de' Sismondi | solemn historian and economist | for his works I deserve him | more than can be written | of Italy of France | and of the human race. (Giovanni Battista Niccolini)"

"J. C. L. Simondo Sismondi, History of the Italian republics of the middle centuries, translation from the French, Tome IX, C.E.1818."

"Niccolò Piccinino, leader of the soldiers trained first by Braccio [da Montone], was among the other Italian generals the most loyal to the Duke of Milan. He would still have considered himself the best and perhaps placed above Francesco Sforza, if he had not sometimes risked his own reputation through excessive daring. (volume IX, p. 116)"

"J. C. L. Simondo Sismondi, History of the Italian republics of the middle centuries, translated from the French, Tome X, C.E.1818."

"Piccinino in particular was jealous of Sforza; there could be no peace that this general had taken his place among the sovereigns with the purchase of the March, while he himself, who in talents and valor in Italy was equal to Sforza, he himself, who, as heir and pupil of Braccio, could have aspire to the sovereignty that this general had formed, had only a precarious existence dependent on the prince who hired him. (volume IX, p. 149)"

"Piccinino, already in his old age, could not make peace with the fact that with so many battles, with so many victories, he had not been able to acquire a land where his head could rest. All the great captains of his century had successively risen to sovereign power; he seemed to have more right to it than anyone else, since he should have received the principality of Braccio by hereditary title as he received his army; yet he alone was neither richer nor more powerful at the end of his long glorious career than he was at the beginning. He had lost Bologna when he thought he would make it his capital; two routs in a very short time had squandered his riches and scattered his soldiers; one of his sons was a prisoner, the other a fugitive, and he could only place his hopes in the generosity of a prince [Filippo Maria Visconti] accused of inconstancy by all Italy, and often of perfidy. This prince had actually caused his ruin by deceiving him. (volume IX, pp. 255-256)"

"Universal competition and the effort to produce more and more at a lower price... is a dangerous system."

"The most licentious of all the poets of this libertine school was a Sovereign, a Jerusalem Knight, returned from the Crusade, William IX, Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine. His great joviality and spirit had generally forgiven the scandal of his customs, although in him religious profanation was always mixed with debauchery. He had built in Niort a house dedicated to gathering his Beauty; he called it his Monastery, and he had conferred the titles of Abbess, Prioress and other monastic dignities to the Courtesans who lodged there, in adequate proportion to the impudence of their life. (vol. V, chapter XII, p. 62)"

"The young king [Charles VI of France] had never been subjected to any discipline nor roughed up by the slightest study. He knew nothing other than what he might have learned by conversing in the courts; half enough to acquire a very light set of ideas and common notions, to form the gracefulness of manners and to procure that certain nobility and affability of character that was noted in Charles VI, and for which the monarch whose reign was the most everlasting scourge that ever afflicted France, had the ridiculous of Beloved. But no positive knowledge, neither of science, nor of administration, nor of politics, nor of religion had, on the contrary, been acquired by him. (vol. XII, chapter XXI, pp. 8-9)"

"This unfortunate monarch [Charles VI of France] enjoyed waging war and wandering among the tumult of arms; and although incapable of distinguishing friends from enemies, he was always willing to fight against anyone who was pointed out to him as infenso and rebellious, and also to be cruel against it. (vol. XII, chapter XXX, p. 430)"