8 Quotes by Frank Kermode

It is ourselves we encounter whenever we invent fictions.

I suppose it would be better if one were aggressive, contentious and so on. But there's rarely any occasion to be savage.

The history of interpretation, the skills by which we keep alive in our minds the light and dark of past literature and past humanity ... is to an incalculable extent a history of error.

It is one of the great charms of books that they have to end.

It is not expected of critics that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.

I suppose it would be better if one were aggressive, contentious and so on. But there’s rarely any occasion to be savage.

The books which seal off the long perspectives, which sever us from our losses, which represent the world of potency as a world of act, these are the books which, when the drug wears off, go on to the dump with the other empty bottles. Those that continue to interest us move through time to an end, an end we must sense even if we cannot know it; they live in change, until, which is never, as and is are one.

Having compared the novel-reader with an infant and a primitive, one can go further and call him a psychopath; and this I shall shortly be doing.