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The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.

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Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.

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Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily.

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Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

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A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality

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One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes s...more

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Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

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Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

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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.