Matthew Cheney

“It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

“Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels.”
― Randall Jarrell, No Other Book: Selected Essays – Literary Criticism and Prose by Randall Jarrell, A Leading American Poet-Critic

“He challenged the world with his genius, and the world defeated him by ignoring the challenge and starving him. He stopped writing because he had failed and because he had no choice but to accept the world’s terms: there is no mystery here. This was not insanity, but common sense.”
― Raymond Weaver, The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville: Benito Cereno/Bartleby the Scrivener/The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles/Billy Budd, Foretopman

“Use your imagination," I tell my students these days, "or someone else is going to use it for you.”
― Ronald Sukenick, Down and in: Life in the Underground