Lit Crit Quotes

“We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens. We are now ready to bask in Dickens. [...] If it were possible I would like to devote fifty minutes of every class meeting to mute meditation, concentration, and admiration of Dickens. However, my job is to direct and rationalize those meditations, that admiration. All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Never lightly assume that clarity is the unclouded aim of ... allegory.”
― Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode

“I can tell how good a novel is by how it portrays Jesus.”
― A. Cretan

“People are not suppose to be able to understand your writing, they are only suppose to realise your writing is brilliant, because it might just be the cure for insomnia.”
― BR Myers