Literary Critics

"In fact, it’s the opposite…As a black woman, as a black queer woman, specificity is incredibly important, because diverse experiences are rarely seen in literature."

"The moment I step outside the safety of my home, I hate how visible I am, how people treat me, how they stare and comment both loudly and under their breath … I do not know how to carry myself with confidence when I go out into the world. Any sense of self I have is often shattered within minutes, and then I am all insecurities and fears, wishing myself into a more socially acceptable form."

"I grew up in this world where fat phobia is pervasive…And I just thought, 'Well, boys don't like fat girls, so if I'm fat, they won't want me and they won't hurt me again.' But more than that, I really wanted to just be bigger so that I could fight harder."

"I would definitely like to tear down this wall I've built around myself, because I don't need it anymore. And I know that intellectually, and on good days, I know that emotionally. I don't want to be thin, I want to be smaller, because I just do. I think it makes so many things easier just on a day-to-day basis, and also I have no small amount of vanity, so I just want to be able to find cuter clothes. Sometimes it's really basic things that I would like for myself."

"There is a before and an after…In the after I was broken, shattered, and silent."

"It started as a process of writing what I know to be true and it became a process of revelation. I was able to make some realisations about myself that previously I hadn’t made and it really forced me to confront my relationship not only with my body, but with food. I mostly saw how unkind I had been to myself when my body has actually gotten me through quite a lot in life. And recognising that, in many ways, I was holding on to the weight for the wrong reasons and the only one that was really hurting was myself."

"It’s used like a weapon. What it means is, ‘I don’t want to think about your concerns. I don’t want to have to extend my empathy.’…We have to think with nuance, and unfortunately public discourse rarely allows for nuance. And see where that has gotten us."

"Only "America," of all national designations, took on the combined force of eschatology and chauvinism. Many forms of nationalism have laid claims to a world-redeeming promise; many Christian sects have sought, in open or secret heresy, to find the sacred in the profane; many European Protestants have linked the soul’s journey and the way to wealth. But only the "American Way," of all modern symbologies, has managed to circumvent the contradictions inherent in these approaches. Of all symbols of identity, only "American" has succeeded in uniting nationality with universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, sacred and secular history, the country’s past and the paradise to be, in a single transcendent ideal."

"Kodra: Quasi un simbolo generazionale."

"As I reread these Catholic autobiographies and novels, their odd pridefulness became clearer to me. Much of the Catholic juvenilia I so dearly remembered preached a cover story of self-denial along with a covert sermon about the spiritual and worldly superiority that would result from this self-denial. Writhe and shine."

"“Mr. Wonderful isn’t just going to knock on the door,” a girlfriend once said, chiding me. “Why not?” I thought. That’s the way people often meet in books—effortlessly, without guile or strategizing."

"Angels in the house always die in the books they preside over because early ascension into heaven is their reward—and because their goodness makes them boring."

"The answer to the whodunit of why work was dumped as the novel’s main subject had to do with centuries of theorizing about the function of art intersecting with the dawning of modern capitalism. From Plato onward, philosophers and poets insisted that art should enlighten and elevate. Art has always belonged to the realm of freedom, while work, particularly at the close of the eighteenth century, moved further and further into the realm of necessity. Industrial capitalism made work an even less appealing focus for art because it changed the very nature of work by divorcing the head from the hand. The development of the novel paralleled this split by delving deeper into the head and caring less about what the hand was doing. The public and private spheres also became more rigidly separated under industrial capitalism: the mill was where people had to go for a certain number of hours every day in order to make a living; but that by-product of work—a living—was consumed at home. Storytellers, always on the lookout for a good time, found the private sphere much more diverting that they did the cramped and coerced public sphere of work."

"Now, given the consumer-pleasing politics of today’s universities, I have, in effect, seventy new bosses each semester; they’re sitting at the desks in front of me. If a teacher is not entertaining or lenient enough and her teaching evaluations plummet, she could lose the job."

"Such is the power of words, of writing, of books. Words you loved and will always yearn for. They can inspire you with possibilities you otherwise would have never imagined; they can fill your head with misleading fantasies. They can give you back your seemingly seamless past and place it right alongside your chaotic present. “But that only happens in books,” my mother, pretty much immune to the power of the written word, would say. Exactly. That’s why I can’t stop reading them."

"I don’t believe in identity politics in literature—or in life much, either. Indeed the current scholarly enchantment with identity politics strikes me as a more intellectual version of the warning oft heard around Sunnyside when I was growing up: “Stick with your own kind.” Family and cultural origins are crucial to self-definition, but they’re not the end of the story. I certainly don’t think that we readers only or even chiefly enjoy or understand books whose main characters mirror us. In fact, the opportunity to become who we are decidedly not—whether it’s Amis’s Dixon or Philip Roth’s Portnoy or Ellison’s Invisible Man or Kafka’s beetle—is one of the greatest gifts reading offers. Women readers get to serve on that floating boy’s club, the Pequod; male readers get to step into Elizabeth Bennet’s shoes and teach Mr. Darcy the dance of humility; readers of either gender who are not African American get to crawl toward freedom alongside Toni Morrison’s Sethe. One of the most magical and liberating things about literature is that it can transport us readers into worlds totally unlike our own."

"The thing that mattered most in this elite new world of mine was brainpower—or, at least, the projection of brainpower. Being a decent, truthful, charitable person—none of those traditional Judeo-Christian virtues counted. Wit, verbal adroitness, a substantive intellectual background (or at least the illusion of one), and condescension toward one’s mental inferiors were the marks of distinction here. Theory, with its bizarre vocabulary of literary encryption, was just beginning to take root at Penn and other top graduate schools across the land."

"As Richard Rodriguez points out in his beautiful and incisive memoir Hunger of Memory, when academics now talk on about race, class, and gender, what they’re usually talking about is race and gender."

"It’s weird to make oneself one’s “field,” but lots of academics these days are doing it—industriously promoting their own race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and/or religion as their intellectual specialty. Once of the many drawbacks of this “I teach what I am” approach is that it stifles classroom discussion. Any disagreement with the professor’s expertise comes off as an ad hominem attack."

"Books just don’t register with this crowd. They think I lack common sense; I think they lack a part of their souls."

"As someone from our adoption agency said to us before we left, “You may have been waiting for your daughter for a long time, but she has not been waiting for you.”"

"We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own life stories and—equally important—to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others’."

"In our daily lives, where we’re bombarded by the fake and the trivial, reading serves as a way to stop, shut out the noise of the world, and try to grab hold of something real, no matter how small."

"I think, consciously or not, what we readers do each time we open a book is to set off on a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things, and sometimes even a few good sentences contained in an otherwise unexceptional book can crystallize vague feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or, sometimes, profound epiphanies."

"Jane has learned that there is a fate more terrible than solitude: it’s solitude in the company of a husband who essentially misunderstands you."

"The best Dorothy Parker-like riposte to nosy questions about adoption was uttered by a friend of a friend of mine on a New York City bus. This white mother and her Chinese baby daughter were riding up Madison Avenue when an older woman got on, sat down across from them, and barked out: “Is her father Chinese?” “I don’t know,” the mother replied. “It was dark.”"

"Freud in fact defines hysteria as the conflict of two incompatible wishes, as Hegel defined tragedy as the conflict of two incompatible necessities."

"Tylor's evolutionary anthropology, carried on by such successors as R. R. Marett and Henry Balfour, became the central tradition of British anthropology, but the emphasis gradually shifted from Tylor's concern with bellief and custom to the more tanglible areas of social organization, economics, and material culture."

"Reflecting on their friendship many years later, Ellison would credit Hyman as a crucial influence on his fiction. If Ellison was struggling with a project, Hyman often stepped in to encourage him. In 1943, when Ellison was about to ship out to the merchant marine, Hyman urged him first to finish 'Flying Home,' the story that would be his breakthrough work."

"For years after he joined the Bennington faculty his course, "Myth-Ritual-Literature," was said to be the most popular undergraduate offering of the college."

"In general, Eble's estimate of Fitzgerald's work seems to me just, even his suggestion that The Great Gatsby may be the greatest novel between Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye."

"It is very probable that the Hindenburg Line to which the defence of our traditions retired as a result of the onslaughts of the last century will be blown up in the near future. If this should happen a mental chaos such as man has never experienced may be expected. We shall then be thrown back, as Matthew Arnold foresaw, upon poetry. It is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos."

"A book is a machine to think with, but it need not, therefore, usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive."

"The chief lesson to be learnt from it is the futility of all argumentation that precedes understanding. We cannot profitably attack any opinion until we have discovered what it expresses as well as what it states."

"An experience has to be formed, no doubt, before it is communicated, but it takes the form it does largely because it may have to be communicated."

"Very simple experiences – a cold bath in an enamelled tin, or running for a train – may to some extent be compared without elaborate vehicles; and friends exceptionally well acquainted with one another may manage some rough comparisons in ordinary conversation. But subtle or recondite experiences are for most men incommunicable and indescribable, though social conventions or terror of the loneliness of the human situation may make us pretend the contrary.”"

"Mikä olen? Tähdenlento Luojan ikuisessa yössä, tomujyvä aavan aineen lakkaamattomassa työssä.'Mutta sentään! Tahdon antaa hehkun hetkelleni tälle, tahdon loistaa, tahdon laulaa kiitoslaulun elämälle.'Tahdon laulaa: mitä siitä, jos ma lopuin, kussa aloin, mutta silmänräpäyksen valokaarin yössä paloin!'Hetken sykin, liekkisydän, aurinkona maailman oman tunsin kauneuden kaipuun, rakkauden rajattoman.'Alistukaa, avaruudet, pienen tähden välkynnälle! Tahdon loistaa, tahdon laulaa kiitoslaulun elämälle."

"As soon as the English mind came in contact with the Hindu's, which was a very different kind of mind, it completely lost its temper, and so became incapable of dispassionate analysis. But the display of temper was at least spectacular, like fireworks."

"I say that the Muslims do not have the slightest right to complain about the desecration of one mosque. From 1000 A.D., every Hindu temple from Kathiawar to Bihar from the Himalayas to the Vindhyas, has been sacked and ruined. Not one temple was left standing all over northern India… Temples escaped destruction only where Muslim power did not gain access to them for reasons such as dense forests. Otherwise it was a continuous spell of vandalism. No nation, with any self-respect, will forgive this. They took over our women. And they imposed the Jaziya, the tax. Why should we forget and forgive all that? What happened in Ayodhya would not have happened, had the Muslims acknowledged this historical argument even once. Then we could have said : All right, let the past remain in the past and let us see how best we can solve this problem…"

"The immense noisy crowds that greeted the end of British rule in India with deafening shouts of joy on August 15, 1947, did not recall the old saying: they thought nothing of British rule would survive in their country after the departure of the White men who had carried it on. They never perceived that British rule in India had created an impersonal structure.... a system of government for which there was no substitute."

"I understood the life around me better, not from love, which everybody acknowledges to be a great teacher, but from estrangement, to which nobody has attributed the power of reinforcing insight."

"By the time the Muslims established their rule in the country (circa 1200 A.D.) the old inhabitants of the country, i.e. the Hindus, had lost their vitality to such an extent that they became incapable of dealing with or even facing a situation if it was difficult or unpleasant. So they surrendered to any situation that was created for them by history and tried to be at peace with their conscience by banishing it from their mind with soothing words."

"Money in the pocket, devil in the heart."

"Night is an ally of sorrowful people."

"In Chin Sheng-t'an's commentaries his personality looms large and at times commands more attention than the text itself. To some extent, his commentaries are dialogues with the reader in which the literary work is but a pretext."

"Wasting one's time is one way of occupying it, not wasting time is also another way of occupying it, and not to mind going on wasting time even knowing that it is a waste of time is also another way of occupying it. ... I have well understood life, and therefore I can do what I naturally want to do. To do what I naturally want to do is also a way of occupying time."

"In making these comments, my motive is really not to go to all the trouble for the sake of the ancient author, but because I feel I have an obligation to the future readers and wish to do something about it."

"Chin Shengt'an regards reading a banned book behind closed doors on a snowy night as one of the greatest pleasures of life."

"A traveller returns home after a long journey, and he sees the old city gate and hears the women and children on both banks of the river talking his own dialect. Ah, is this not happiness?"

"To find accidently a handwritten letter of some old friend in a trunk. Ah, is this not happiness?"