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Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful.

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Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the p...more

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Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for "transport".

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Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.

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The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

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Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

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Originality must compound with inheritance.

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Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.

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Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge.

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Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.

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Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.

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All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.

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It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory.

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Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket

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Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes