We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while t...here is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inne...r self.... The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
She even had a kind of special position among men: she was an exception, she fitted none of the categories they commonly used when... talking about girls; she wasn't a cock-teaser, a cold fish, an easy lay or a snarky bitch; she was an honorary person. She had grown to share their contempt for most women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The things which can make life enjoyable remain the same. They are, now as before, reading, music, fine arts, travel, the enjoymen...t of nature, sports, fashion, social vanity (knightly orders, honorary offices, gatherings) and the intoxication of the senses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literature takes shape and life in the body, in the wombs of the mother tongue: always: and the Fathers of Culture get anxious abo...ut paternity. They start talking about legitimacy. They steal the baby. They ensure by every means that the artist, the writer, is male. This involves intellectual abortion by centuries of women artists, infanticide of works by women writers, and a whole medical corps of sterilizing critics working to purify the Canon, to reduce the subject matter and style of literature to something Ernest Hemingway could have understood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a ...woman we don't start measuring her limbs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O! that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew;... Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world. Fie on't! O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They who say that women do not desire the right of suffrage, that they prefer masculine domination to self-government, falsify eve...ry page of history, every fact in human experience. It has taken the whole power of the civil and canon law to hold woman in the subordinate position which it is said she willingly accepts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »