
“Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.”
"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction
J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 73
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)
“Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.”
"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction
“(On being censored): “It amazes me how afraid they are of 1 person…. basically a joke blower!””
Relentless (1992)
“By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i. e. anything we can talk about.”
"Reflections on Real and Unreal Objects", Undated, MS 966
“It's amazing how a little tomorrow can make up for a whole lot of yesterday.”
Source: Landscape of the Body
Talking about his father and family relationships in South Bank Show (2007)
“Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine! Mine!”
Source: The Year of the Flood
Collected Writings volume xxviii pages 21-22
Context: The boys, who cannot grow up to adult human nature, are beating the prophets of the ancient race — Marx, Freud, Einstein — who have been tearing at our social, personal and intellectual roots, tearing with an objectivity which to the healthy animal seems morbid, depriving everything, as it seems, of the warmth of natural feeling. What traditional retort have the schoolboys but a kick in the pants?...
To our generation Einstein has been made to become a double symbol — a symbol of the mind travelling in the cold regions of space, and a symbol of the brave and generous outcast, pure in heart and cheerful of spirit. Himself a schoolboy, too, but the other kind — with ruffled hair, soft hands and a violin. See him as he squats on Cromer beach doing sums, Charlie Chaplin with the brow of Shakespeare...
So it is not an accident that the Nazi lads vent a particular fury against him. He does truly stand for what they most dislike, the opposite of the blond beast — intellectualist, individualist, supernationalist, pacifist, inky, plump... How should they know the glory of the free-ranging intellect and soft objective sympathy to whom money and violence, drink and blood and pomp, mean absolutely nothing? Yet Albert and the blond beast make up the world between them. If either cast the other out, life is diminished in its force. When the barbarians destroy the ancient race as witches, when they refuse to scale heaven on broomsticks, they may be dooming themselves to sink back into the clods which bore them.
“You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 28
“Can you see me? Can you hear me? Does anything I say mean anything to you?”
Acceptance speech of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (1952) for The Sea Around Us; also in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) edited by Linda Lear, p. 91