literature
George Steiner
I must, even if only provisionally, consider the intimate complementarities between an authentic act of reading, an authentic motion of answerability to music and to art, and the rights to human privacy, to the wholly personal hospitality we owe our death—rights and an indebtedness now under pressure of narcotic devaluation in a culture of the secondary.Robert Haas
...Pound's deepest interest in the ritual: that it was about transformation and renewal at every level, about any time in our lives when we step into the pulse of life, as if into fire or the current of a river, and are altered by it. It is about any transfiguration. To read, to read deeply, and to be changed by what we read is to have eaten the flame.Wendell Berry
To assume that the context of literature is "the literary world" is, I believe, simply wrong. That its real habitat is the household and the community--that it can and does affect, even in practical ways, the life of a place--may not be recognized by most theorists and critics for awhile yet. But they will finally come to it, because finally they will have to. And when they do, they will renew the study of literature and restore it to importance.Joseph Meeker
Comedy demonstrates that man is durable even though he be weak, stupid, undignified. As the tragic hero suffers or dies for his ideals, the comic hero survives without them. At the end of his tale he manages to marry his girl, evade his enemies, slip by the oppressive authorities, avoid drastic punishment, and to stay alive.Tragedy demands that choices be made among alternatives; comedy assumes that all choice is likely to be in error and that survival depends upon finding accommodations that will permit all parties to endure.