Laurel Narizny > Laurel's Quotes

“Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.”
― Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn

“Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing.”
― Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn

“My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.”
― Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn

“Here's the thing: the act of reading changes your life, sometimes in large ways, sometimes in small ways, but every book you read asks you to move outside of yourself and your own experience to consider the lives of others. So I can't identify a particular book that altered my life, but I do know that the act of reading has pushed me to engage more deeply with the world (real and imagined), and I'm grateful for that.”
― Ethan Rutherford