No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic t...o decide.... I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts--especially texts by black women. A working-class Jew...ish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
lf, presume not to God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man.... Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man.... Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest, In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast, In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reasoning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such Whether he thinks too little or too much: Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; Still by himself abused, or disabused; Created half to rise and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled; The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There was an old man from Peru Who dreamed he was eating his shoe;... He woke in a fright In the middle of the night And found it was perfectly true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With my desire to write he seemed in full sympathy, and in urging our early marriage he argued that my first necessity was leisure... in which to develop and to master my craft. It appeared to me that with such a man as teacher and guide I could not fail, and it was in a queer mixture of young love and vaulting ambition that I became a wife.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of all the barbarous middle ages, that Which is most barbarous is the middle age... Of man! it is--I really scarce know what; But when we hover between fool and sage, And don't know justly what we would be at-- A period something like a printed page, Black letter upon foolscap, while our hair Grows grizzled, and we are not what we were.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An enormously vast field lies between "God exists" and "there is no God." The truly wise man traverses it with great difficulty. A... Russian knows one or the other of these two extremes, but is not interested in the middle ground. He usually knows nothing, or very little.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping thro...ugh everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gain...s, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »