Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it is the occasion for our cleverness fills me with baffled bitterness and anger.

When it turned on the Jew, Christianity and European civilization turned on the incarnation – albeit an incarnation often wayward and unaware – of its own best hopes.

I’m sorry, I’m absolutely convinced that there is at the moment no realistic prospect for very much hope in human affairs.

The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius.

To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.

But there is a third mode of trancendence: in it language simply ceases, and the motion of spirit gives no further outward manifestation of its being. The poet enters into silence. Here the word borders not on radiance or music, but on night.

When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch’s shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoevsky if he could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue the poise of Lawrence if he could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow?

Those who, in actual fact, generate the syllabus, who recognize, elucidate, and transmit the legacy of literacy in regard to textual, artistic, and musical creation, have always been, are a handful.

Fischer does not merely outplay opponents; he leaves them bodily and mentally glutted. Fisher himself speaks of the exultant instant in which he feels the ‘ego of the other player crumbling.’