The Sense of an Ending Quotes

“The books which seal off the long perspectives, which sever us from our losses, which represent the world of potency as a world of act, these are the books which, when the drug wears off, go on to the dump with the other empty bottles. Those that continue to interest us move through time to an end, an end we must sense even if we cannot know it; they live in change, until, which is never, as and is are one.”
― Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

“the buoyancy of chiliasts”
― Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending

“Having compared the novel-reader with an infant and a primitive, one can go further and call him a psychopath; and this I shall shortly be doing.”
― Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction