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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 944fe83 | Many of its cities--particularly the smaller ones at the intersection of old and new imperial boundaries, such as Trieste, Sarajevo, Salonika, Cernovitz, Odessa or Vilna--were truly multicultural societies avant le mot, where Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, Jews and others lived in familiar juxtaposition. We should not idealise this old Europe. What the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski called 'the incredible, almost comical melting-pot of peopl.. | Tony Judt | ||
| 17dc47a | Let us look once more at Yeats. At bottom, he was sceptical about the nonsense with which he satisfied what we can call his lust for commitment. Now and again he believed some of it, but in so far as his true commitment was to poetry he recognized his fictions as heuristic and dispensable, 'consciously false.' 'They give me metaphors for poetry,' he noted. The dolls and the amulets, the swords and the systems, were the tools of an operation.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| 46d68b5 | The books which seal off the long perspectives, which sever us from our losses, which represent the world of potency as a world of act, these are the books which, when the drug wears off, go on to the dump with the other empty bottles. Those that continue to interest us move through time to an end, an end we must sense even if we cannot know it; they live in change, until, which is never, as and is are one. | Frank Kermode | ||
| 8c851ed | In the nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet there is an attempt at a more or less Copernican change in the relation between the paradigm and the text. In Camus the counter-pointing is less doctrinaire; in Dostoevsky there is no evidence of any theoretical stand at all, simply rich originality within or without, as it chances, normal expectations. All these are novels which most of us would agree (and it is by a consensus of this kind only that th.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| edc8396 | When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with medieval apocalypse than with the mythos and opsis of Aristotle. Later, tragedy itself succumbs to the pressure of 'demythologizing'; the End itself, in modern literary plotting loses its downbeat, tonic-and-dominant finality, and we think of it, as the theologians think of Apocalypse, as immanent rather than imminent. Thus, as.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| f957889 | But that there is a simple relation between literary and other fictions seems, if one attends to it, more obvious than has appeared. If we think first of modern fictions, it can hardly be an accident that ever since Nietzsche generalized and developed the Kantian insights, literature has increasingly asserted its right to an arbitrary and private choice of fictional norms, just as historiography has become a discipline more devious and dubi.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| c77e358 | There may even be a real relation between certain kinds of effectiveness in literature and totalitarianism in politics. But although the fictions are alike ways of finding out about the human world, anti-Semitism is a fiction of escape which tells you nothing about death but projects it onto others; whereas King Lear is a fiction that inescapably involves an encounter with oneself, and the image of one's end. This is one difference; and the.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| 9c8c6c9 | here is one other element of the apocalyptic tradition to be considered, namely transition. I said a minute ago that one of the assumptions prevalent in sophisticated apocalyptism was what Yeats called 'antithetical multiform influx'--the forms assumed by the inrushing gyre as the old one reaches its term. The dialectic of Yeats's gyres is simple enough in essence; they are a figure for the co-existence of the past and future at the time of.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| 6ccb67c | The first phase of modernism, which so far as the English language goes we associate with Pound and Yeats, Wyndham Lewis and Eliot and Joyce, was clerkly enough, sceptical in many ways; and yet we can without difficulty convict most of these authors of dangerous lapses into mythical thinking. All were men of critical temper, haters of the decadence of the times and the myths of mauvaise foi. All, in different ways, venerated tradition and h.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| 5a0e776 | Apocalypse is a part of the modern Absurd. This is testimony to its vitality, a vitality dependent upon its truth to the set of our fear and desire. Acknowledged, qualified by the scepticism of the clerks, it is--even when ironized, even when denied--an essential element in the arts, a permanent feature of a permanent literature of crisis. If it becomes myth, if its past is forgotten, we sink quickly into myth, into stereotype. We have to e.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| e692174 | Novels, says Sartre, are not life, but they owe our power upon us, as upon himself as an infant, to the fact that they are somehow like life. In life, he once remarked, 'all ways are barred and nevertheless we must act. So we try to change the world; that is, to live as if the relations between things and their potentialities were governed not by deterministic processes but by magic.' The as if of the novel consists in a similar negation of.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| bfc50da | For Aristotle the literary plot was analogous to the plot of the world in that both were eductions from the potency of matter. Sartre denies this for the world, and specifically denies, in the passage just referred to, that without potentiality there is no change. He reverts to the Megaric view of the matter, which Aristotle took such trouble to correct. But this is not our affair. The fact is that even if you believe in a Megaric world the.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| ea19f1a | When a work becomes canonical its internal order and logic are guaranteed by the collective will of the canonical community. Its consonance with the known truths and reality outside the text is similarly committed to. What Frank Kermode referred to as the Principle of Complementarity is the willed assumption of the community that has invested value and meaning in a text that the text must make sense within itself and against its extratextua.. | Jonathan A.C. Brown | ||
| 5a8d04a | When my mother told my father what had happened, he didn't want to believe it. "Nobody ever wants to believe what happens to the Jews," she said, "not even us." | anti-semitism jews judaism persecution troubles woes | Nathan Englander | |
| 1419a2c | It is hard to know what a person would and wouldn't do in any specific instance. And you, spoiled child, apply the rules of civilization to a boy who had only seen its opposite. Maybe the fault for those deaths lies in a system designed for the killing of Tendlers that failed to do its job. An error, a slip that allowed a Tendler, no longer fit, back loose in the world. | Nathan Englander | ||
| 3876caa | And as he went, he sang, saying-- Well, Faithful, thou hast faithfully profest Unto thy Lord; with whom thou shalt be blest, When faithless ones, with all their vain delights, Are crying out under their hellish plights: Sing, Faithful, sing, and let thy name survive; For though they kill'd thee, thou art yet alive! | John Bunyan | ||
| 86ba0b4 | We should not take lightly the horrible thoughts this place of death and destruction are meant to unveil. We are warned about the misery of death and Hell and should reflect upon its timeless torments and endless darkness in which men grope hopelessly for some relief that they are fully persuaded no longer exists. 8. | John Bunyan | ||
| 7d20d98 | The man with whom you are so impressed will beguile with that tongue of his twenty who do not know him."2 "Do" | John Bunyan | ||
| 733bcae | Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven. | hell | John Bunyan | |
| 47a81e4 | The bothersome noise of religious talk grows irksome when laid upon the living score of discordant behavior. Talkative's | John Bunyan | ||
| dbd627f | Your impression of him as a respectable man brings to my mind the work of a painter whose pictures show attractively at a distance but unpleasantly up close." "I" | John Bunyan | ||
| a3bf34b | Religion has no place in his heart, his home, or his conversation. He is all talk, and his religion is to make noise with his mouth." "Really!" | John Bunyan | ||
| 21ef1d5 | Most men will not ignore the present world that they can see in order to make the world they cannot see the object of their desires. Therefore, there is an immediate friendship between this world and a man's fleshly desires and a corresponding distance between carnal man and eternal things. | John Bunyan | ||
| 96c20f7 | They now see with Heaven's eyes the schemes, traps, enticements, and entertainments of the world in a new way. So | John Bunyan | ||
| 89eaa2b | Then said the giant, "Thou practices the craft of a kidnapper. Thou gatherest up woman and children and carriest them into a strange country, to the weakening of my master's kingdom." But now Great-Heart replied, "I am a servant of the God of Heaven; my business is to persuade sinners of repentance. I am commanded to do my endeavor to turn men, women and children, fro darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God." -- | John Bunyan | ||
| 5bf10e2 | If you want to be a godly head of a family, you must ensure that there is Christian harmony among those under you, appropriate for a house where the leader fears God. JOHN BUNYAN | Voddie T. Baucham Jr. | ||
| 718af05 | He ran till he came to a small hill, at the top of which stood a cross and at the bottom of which was a tomb. I saw in my dream that when Christian walked up the hill to the cross, his burden came loose from his shoulders and fell off his back, tumbling down the hill until it came to the mouth of the tomb, where it fell in to be seen no more. | John Bunyan | ||
| 7465c7d | It is my duty, said he, to distrust mine own ability, that I may have reliance on him that is stronger than all. | John Bunyan | ||
| bcf0804 | he had eyes lifted up to Heaven, the best of books in his hand, the law of truth written upon his lips, the world behind his back. He stood as if pleading with men, and a crown of gold hung over his head." Then" | John Bunyan | ||
| 7ba4c65 | the corporate system that animates all the forces who would block the progress of a true pilgrim bound for the Celestial City. Vanity Fair is the City of Destruction, the world, dressed in its best party dress. It is the place where the most seductive attractions of the world take center stage in an attempt to steal our gaze, cool our resolve, and shake our confidence, which is to be in the God who is the maker and builder of the yet unseen.. | John Bunyan | ||
| 745d619 | CHR. True or right fear is discovered by three things:-- 1. By its rise; it is caused by saving convictions for sin. 2. It driveth the soul to lay fast hold of Christ for salvation. 3. It begetteth and continueth in the soul a great reverence of God, his Word, and ways, keeping it tender, and making it afraid to turn from them, to the right hand or to the left, to anything that may dishonour God, break its peace, grieve the Spirit, or cause.. | John Bunyan | ||
| 1c91675 | The great enemy of grace is the strict accounting of our sin and corruption that when added up totals such a staggering debt that no person without faith in the sure promises of God would ever dare calculate that anything good awaits him and would further be convinced that all that does lie ahead is a complete foreclosure of his soul and all its contents. Pliable, | John Bunyan | ||
| 10b4354 | The new convert is tested to see if the words he professes are justified with corresponding fruit in his life. Christian's | John Bunyan | ||
| c155170 | As Pliable and Christian find themselves walking together toward the narrow gate, we see the stark contrast between the two pilgrims. One is burdened; the other is not. One is clutching a book that is a light to his path. The other is guideless. One is on the journey in pursuit of deliverance from besetting sins and rest for his soul. The other is on the journey in order to obtain future delights that temporarily dazzle his mind. One is slo.. | John Bunyan | ||
| 8271119 | The hill, though high, I desire to ascend, The difficulty will not me offend; For Iperceive | John Bunyan | ||
| 3b37c1f | The Conclusion NOW Reader, I have told my Dream to thee; See if thou can'st interpret it to me, Or to thyself, or Neighbor; but take heed Of mis-interpreting; for that, instead Of doing good, will but thyself abuse: 5 By mis-interpreting, evil ensues. Take heed also, that thou be not extreme, In playing with the out-side of my Dream: Nor let my figure or similitude Put thee into a laughter or a feud; 10 Leave this for Boys .. | John Bunyan | ||
| 7b2d313 | it is common for those that have called themselves His servants, after awhile to give Him the slip, and return again to me. | John Bunyan | ||
| df7a3f6 | There'll be no more crying, or sorrow; for the owner of the place will wipe all tears from our eyes. | John Bunyan | ||
| 17715ee | Aquele que ja esta no chao nao precisa de cair; Aquele que desceu ao mais baixo nao precisa de ter orgulho. | John Bunyan | ||
| 750b71c | it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself, the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever | John Bunyan | ||
| 703b591 | Now, according to the strength or weakness of his faith in his Savior, so is his joy and peace, so is his love for holiness, so are his desires to know Him more and to serve Him more single-mindedly in this present world. "But" | John Bunyan | ||
| 7f4f0bb | Everyone needs to make his own choices. You need to mind your own business and not meddle in ours." So" | John Bunyan | ||
| 5e107db | Sinclair's was also an age when writers, both journalists and novelists, were experiencing a thrilling sense of their own efficacy. The investigative expose--what President Theodore Roosevelt would unflatteringly dub "muckraking," after the character in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678, 1684) who could "look no way but downward, with a muckrake in his hands"--had taken the magazine and publishing world by storm, had grabbed hold o.. | Upton Sinclair | ||
| 9f6f829 | I've had a weird couple of weeks, you know?" "I completely know". "But I- I mean, I'm not totally happy, but there's no way I'd go back to my old obvious self! I like it here. I like all the... confusion and heartbreak". "It wasn't that bad... was it?" "Scott... yes, it was. But I feel like I've learned some stuff along the way. I know things now"." | scott-pilgrim scott-pilgrim-vs-the-world | Bryan Lee O'Malley |