Daily Dose

From Kabbalah and Criticism, by Harold Bloom

INFLUENCE

"'Influence' is an ambivalent word to use in any discourse about literature, for 'influence' is as complex a trope as language affords."

From The Necessity of Misreading

Daily Dose

From The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, translated by John E. Woods

CONTEMPT

"His opponent's contempt for the love of literary form, he cried, only too plainly revealed a taste for the frenzied barbarism of certain epochs, but without such a love no true humanity was possible. or even conceivable, not now, not ever."

From A Good Soldier

Daily Dose

From Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, by Wendy Lesser

LITERATURE

"Literature is, among other things, an undermining of the coherent worldview."

From Four, Authority