The Third Book of Criticism Quotes

“When we think of the masterpieces that nobody praised and nobody read, back there in the past, we feel an impatient superiority to the readers of the past. If we had been there, we can’t help feeling, we’d have known that Moby-Dick was a good book—-why, how could anyone help knowing?

But suppose someone says to us, “Well, you’re here now: what’s our own Moby-Dick? What’s the book that, a hundred years from now, everybody will look down on us for not having liked?” What do we say then?”
― Randall Jarrell, The Third Book of Criticism

“So rapid an understanding can almost be called a form of stupidity, of not even trying really to understand.”
― Randall Jarrell, The Third Book of Criticism