Everything was doomed [in 1943]: [Yankev Glatshteyn’s] people, his tradition, its language, his artistic freedom, his chances of contributing to a continuing literature. Even his awesome responsibility as the chronicler of the last days of…
Any author, [Marcel] Proust wrote Jaloux, should be happy to “write for a single, exquisite reader like you,” and he added a Proustian analogy comparing Jaloux’s contact with his book to pollen intended for “a…
I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful. For, not only every man has, in the mighty mass of the world,…
Shakespeare presents them as the happiest married couple in all his work. –Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 518
But whatever be the motive of insult, it is always best to overlook it, for folly scarcely can deserve resentment, and malice is punished by neglect. –Dr. Samuel Johnson, quoted in Paul Fussell, Samuel…
It has been said of the play “Hamlet” that its best scene is the one in which Horatio first sees the ghost, or the one in which he tells Hamlet of it, or the one…
[Hamlet] inherits the virtues of a score of his predecessors–and some of their weaknesses. Yet he is no mere recapitulation of them. In him, rather, they recombine to make a man as individual as he…
1. “What will a pundit’s scholarship profit him if he does not think of God and has no discrimination and renunciation? Of what use is erudition if the mind dwells on ‘woman and gold’?”–Sri Ramakrishna,…
Make the most and best of your lot, and compare yourself not with the few that are above you, but with the multitudes which are below you. –Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, The Life of…
Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. –Oscar Wilde, quoted in Christopher Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples