David Denby > Quotes

“Whether white, black, Asian, or Latino, American students rarely arrive at college as habitual readers, which means that few of them have more than a nominal connection to the past. It is absurd to speak, as does the academic left, of classic Western texts dominating and silencing everyone but a ruling elite or white males. The vast majority of white students do not know the intellectual tradition that is allegedly theirs any better than black or brown ones do. They have not read its books, and when they do read them, they may respond well, but they will not respond in the way that the academic left supposes. For there is only one ‘hegemonic discourse’ in the lives of American undergraduates, and that is the mass media. Most high schools can't begin to compete against a torrent of imagery and sound that makes every moment but the present seem quaint, bloodless, or dead.”
― David Denby, Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World

“So the obvious, then: the liberal arts in general, and especially reading seriously, offer an opening to a wider life, the powers of active citizenship (including the willingness to vote); reading strengthens perception, judgment, and character; it creates understanding of other people and oneself, maybe kindliness and wit, and certainly the ability to endure solitude, both in the common sense of empty-room loneliness and the cosmic sense of empty-universe loneliness. Reading fiction carries you further into imagination and invention than you would be capable of on your own, takes you into other people’s lives, and often, by reflection, deeper into your own. I will indulge a resounding tautology: every great civilization, including ours, has had a great literature and great readers. If literature matters less to young people than it once did, we are all in trouble.”
― David Denby, Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-four Books That Can Change Lives.

“Corporate irony not only ridicules the thing it is selling but the very act of selling it. In the process it disarms critics by making anyone who goes against the flow of commerce seem clueless.”
― David Denby

“I was shocked. A dying word, “shocked.” Few people have been able to use it well since Claude Rains so famously said, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here,” as he pocketed his winnings in Casablanca. But it’s the only word for excitement and alarm of this intensity.”
― David Denby, Great Books

“Snark often functions as an enforcer of mediocrity and conformity. In its cozy knowingness, snark flatters you by assuming that you get the contemptuous joke. You've been admitted, or readmitted, to a club, though it may be the club of the second-rate.”
― David Denby, Snark: A Polemic in Seven Fits

“Just because a book is a classic doesn't mean it has anything to do with real life. Homer's ILIAD is taught at Columbia precisely because most Columbia professors have never seen combat. Daily life on the Columbia Campus involves no bloodshed, no sacrifice, and no possibility of recognition. Indeed, for most college students daily life is less like Homer's ILIAD and more like THE LAST PICTURE SHOW by Larry McMurtry. But who wants to read a book set in Texas?”
― David Denby, Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World

“But after children leave their parents' arms, school is still the necessary place for knowledge and soul to spring into life and good teachers are still the instigators of that miracle.”
― David Denby, Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-four Books That Can Change Lives.

“Great literature, obviously, could not rescue anyone from so grievous a fore-shortening of perspective. It was naïve and false on my part to think that the stu-dents would be rescued by Western classics. I knew perfectly well that great books work on our souls only over time, as they are mixed with experience and transformed by memory and desire and many other books, great and small. At some time later, the perception of a ‘choice between freedom and sex’ would dis-solve into absurdity. But for a while, the idea worked its mischief.”
― David Denby, Great Books

“A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.”
― David Denby, Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-four Books That Can Change Lives.

“If you don't read books, and if you don't get consumed by the physical and moral life of men and women in fiction and history, too many facets of yourself may never come into being.”
― David Denby, Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-four Books That Can Change Lives.

“patience was not just a manner, it was the very form of seminar teaching. Columbia’s core curriculum had been designed not to enshrine the authority of the lecturing professor (that was something done at Harvard) but to reach understanding through discussion, however clumsy and uncertain. Till this moment, I never knew myself. . . . Vanity, not love has been my folly!”
― David Denby, Great Books

“We seek knowledge only because we desire enjoyment, and it is impossible to conceive why a person who has neither desires nor fears would take the trouble to reason. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality”
― David Denby, Great Books

“But what about high school? How do you establish reading pleasure in busy, screen-loving teenagers—and in particular, pleasure in reading serious work? Is it still possible to raise teenagers who can’t live without reading something good? Or is that idea absurd? And could the struggle to create such hunger have any effect on the character of boys and girls?”
― David Denby, Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-four Books That Can Change Lives.

“Which, all in all, is rather deflating and dismaying, since many of us would be loath to nominate Prussia in 1815, with its censorship, its lack of representative bodies, as our ideal of freedom. Indeed, if Prussia was Hegel’s ideal, he may well have approved, despite his dismissal of the morality of the East, the paternalistic and authoritarian Singapore—approved it far more than he would modern America, with its liberty bordering at times on chaos, its commercialized hedonism, its temper split between derision and sanctimoniousness.”
― David Denby, Great Books

“The trouble with today's snarky pipsqueaks who break off a sentence or two, or who write a couple of mean paragraphs, is that they don't go far enough; they don't have a coherent view of life. Spinning around in the media from moment to moment, they don't stand for anything, push for anything; they're mere opportunists without dedication, and they don't win any victories.”
― David Denby, Snark: A Polemic in Seven Fits

“For many kids, a good teacher may be the most palpable form of honor they will ever experience.”
― David Denby

“Snark is what people on the inside call any attempt at protest from people on the outside. I hate it on principle, as do all Columbia professors, Catholic priests, and Mississippi Klansmen.”
― David Denby, Snark: A Polemic in Seven Fits

“...used to put movies down by saying that they were 'deep on the surface' --meaning that there was nothing underneath.”
― David Denby

“After a bit, Mr. Leon said, 'This idea that you don't necessarily act in your own best interests struck me very hard when I first read Dostoevsky. Each man may choose to do things against his own interests because it preserves his personality.”
― David Denby, Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-four Books That Can Change Lives.

“Origin stories vary, so you may have to choose your favorite creation myth.”
― David Denby, Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer