Quoting someone else's quotes

I might end my self-imposed moratorium on buying more books. I finished Michael Dirda’s Book by Book and wanting to underline, fold corners, and circle the books I want to get around to reading someday, but the library wouldn’t appreciate my commentary, I’m sure. Some notes on the book, which is a series of quotes arranged and knit together with his commentary on books and life/life with books/living through books.

I agree with his list of 13 suggestions to encourage kids to read, although with reservations I agree the somewhat controversial “Quantity matters far more than quality – there will be plenty of time for classics.” Like vegetables, classics have to be forced down every now and then until a taste for them is developed. (I would like to take this opportunity to reassure him that I have said to my child, “Just a minute, I want to finish this chapter.)”

2 books he (and others) repeatedly recommend that I need to remember to get at some point: Little, Big by John Crowley, and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.


I would like to be a guest in his guest room library.

Since the book is drawn from the quotes in his commonplace book, I thought I’d follow Dirda’s example and note some of my favorite quotes which he has quoted (and some of his own pithy one liners):


On Learning:
(quotes without attribution are Dirda’s own words) : “Erudition makes people feel uneasy; at worst it can seem vaguely undemocratic.” (a problem at school)

Anthony Hecht on John Crowe Ransom: “Mr. Ransom did not lecture, he inquired, and he invited the class to join his inquiry .. . . For one learned from him, not facts or positions, but a posture of the mind and spirit, a humanity and courtesy, a manly considerateness that inhabited his work as it did his person”



Lionel Trilling: on ‘making a life’ [conceiving human existence as a work of art]” “this desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self”



Flannery O’Connor on teaching: "The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.
And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed."


“Contradiction, not consistency, second thoughts, rather than dogmatic certitude, lie at the heart of humane understanding, and all those who try to simplify experience usually only succeed in narrowing it. To my mind, life should be complex, packed with questioning, full of misdirection and wasted effort – a certain number of mistakes is, after all, the price for ‘living large’." Dirda



On Work

Hannah Arendt: “The universal demand for happiness and the widespread unhappiness in our society (and these aer but two sides of the same coin) are among the most persuasive signs that we have begun to line in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented. For only the animal laborans and neither the craftsman nor the man of action , has ever demanded to be ‘happy’ or thought that mortal man could be happy.”



“We refilled our glasses with cognac, after which all things seemed possible.” – William Gerhadie

“An unfulfilled vacation drains the color from a man’s entire existence” – Honore de Balzac

“The chief source of art is man’s pleasure in his daily necessary work, which expresses itself and is embodied in that work itself” – William Morris


On love:

“Twinned helplessness/Against the huge tug of procreation.” Robert Graves

“Romanticism is what brings a couple together, but realism is what sees them through” John Updike

Dirda: “Only critics on deadline must rush to judgment”


On music: All arts according to Walter Pater: “constantly aspire to the condition of music”



On books:

“There are books…which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences" – RW Emerson



“As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.”



“Why is it so hard to talk – not write but speak – about literature? A friend asks about a new novel or collection of poetry? Almost any response tend sto sound a least faintly prissy, hokey, pretentious, academic, or utterly banal . .. The most typical character flaw of the bookish is the desire to show off.”



“A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman” - Wallace Stevens


Note to self: memorize more poetry