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“if you’re egotistical enough to tell others how to write, you may as well go the whole hog and assume that the Venn diagram of absolute critical judgment and your own personal taste presents a total eclipse.”

— Simon Armitage, A Vertical Art, 57

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“Our thinking should have a vigorous fragrance, like a wheatfield on a summer’s night.”

— Nietzsche, quoted in Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p.70

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“Unlike words, which originate like something else (“like flowers”), flowers originate like themselves: they are literally what they are, definable without the assistance of metaphor. It would follow then, since the intent of the poetic word is to originate like the flower, that it strives to banish all metaphor, to become entirely literal.”

— Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, p.4

Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it.

— Richard Powers, The Overstory, p.133

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“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”

— Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations, p. 91

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By a name

I do not know how to tell thee who I am

(Romeo and Juliet)

Romeo’s problem is, first of all, one of ‘introduction.’ How to introduce himself, his body to Juliet; and how to avoid doing so through his father’s name, which he, tragically, inherits.

— Paul Kottman’s introduction to Adriana Cavarero’s Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, p.vii

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“New visions are more frequent in academic blurbs than in optometric clinics.”

— Sumit Guha, History and Collective Memory in South Asia 1200-2000, p.177

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“Nietzsche claimed to recognize the thinkers of the future by their courage to say perhaps.”

— Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, p.52