How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken Quotes

“For (strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even) critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken. What motivates so many of us to write in the first place is, to begin with, a great passion for a subject (Tennessee Williams, Balanchine, jazz, the twentieth-century novel, whatever) that we find beautiful; and, then, a kind of corresponding anxiety about the fragility of that beauty.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

“An epic without a focus - without a single action, a coherent plot, a single terrible point to make - was just a very long poem.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

“It was on the Thursday after September 11 that Persians first started making sense to me. All those years I’d been teaching it, I’d failed to notice the most obviously remarkable thing about it—the device that transmutes the raw and chaotic stuff of lived history into something bigger, something with a universal resonance. As I have said, the play was produced a mere eight years after the Greeks’ fabulous and unexpected victory over their immense foe. How much more striking, then, that Aeschylus—who, it’s perhaps necessary to point out, fought in the Persian Wars himself and lost a brother, called Cynegirus, in the aftermath of the great triumph at Marathon, a death that would become a popular talking point in the later Greek rhetoric about heroism— should have chosen to focus his imaginative sympathy not on the exulting Greeks, but on the sorrowing Persians. Which is to say that, in the very moment of their greatest victory, he asked his fellow Athenians to think radically, to imagine something outside of their own experience, to situate the feelings they were having just then—about themselves, about those others—in a vaster frame: one in which they might see that present triumph could induce a complacency that just might bring about future disaster.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

“It is, indeed, in this light that Capote’s famous characterization of In Cold Blood as “a reflection on American life—this collision between the desperate, ruthless, wandering, savage part of American life, and the other, which is insular and safe,” takes on its proper meaning.T”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

“As the Greeks knew well, it’s the potential for being broken—which boils down to the knowledge that we all must die—that gives resonance and meaning to the small part of the universe that is our life. The necessity, in the end, of yielding to hard and inexplicable realities that are beyond our control is a tragic truth; without that, all you’ve got is mush—melodrama, and Hallmark sentimentality. That so much of contemporary culture is characterized by this kind of sentimentality, by a seeming preference for false “closures” over a strong and meaningful confrontation with real and inalterable pain, is a cultural crisis.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

“How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken” is a quote from the stage directions to a play by Tennessee Willliams, a great American drama about the victimization of a fragile girl who is tragically in love with beautiful, breakable things: the famous glass menagerie that gives the play its title, and which of course provides a richly useful symbol for the themes of delicacy and brittleness, of the lovely illusions that can give purpose to our lives and the hard necessities that can shatter them.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken