5 Quotes by Robert Pogue Harrison

If nothing else, a house is a place to keep books in.

Decadence begins with the loss of restraint.

Human beings, in other words, are always already dead. This proleptic knowledge of finitude predetermines their most creative as well as their most destructive dispositions.

The forests were foris, ‘outside.’ In them lived the outcasts, the mad, the lovers, brigands, hermits, saints, lepers, the paquis, fugitives, misfits, the persecuted, wild men. Where else could they go? Outside of the law and human society one was in the forest. But the forest’s asylum was unspeakable. One could not remain human in the forest; one could only rise above or sink below the human level.

Soul and habitat – we are finally in a position to know this – are correlates of one another.