22 quotes
But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
At the level of ordinary consciousness the individual man is the centre of everything, surrounded on all sides by what he isn't.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn't escape or withdraw from life either: it swallows it.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
One person by himself is not a complete human being.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at any time may crash around our ears.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
The poet...is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
There can be no free speech in a mob: free speech is one thing a mob can't stand.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
In society's eyes the virtue of saying the right thing at the right time is more important that the virtue of telling the whole truth, or even of telling the truth at all.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
Education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him. It doesn't just train the mind: it's a social and moral development too.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.(pg.18)
The Educated Imagination (1963)
The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
Finnegans Wake is not a book to read, but a book to decipher: as Joyce says, it's about a dreamer, but it's addressed to an ideal reader suffering from ideal insomnia.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
In literature you don't just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work of literature forms part. This affects the writer as much as it does the reader.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life...is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us.
The Educated Imagination (1963)
Experience is nearly always commonplace; the present is not romantic in the way the past is, and ideals and great visions have a way of becoming shoddy and squalid in practical life. Literature reverses this process.
The Educated Imagination (1963)