Arnold Weinstein > Quotes

“How much do you know about Shakespeare?'' I once asked a friend who has committed much of her life to studying the Bard. She replied, ''Not as much as he knows about me''. Remember this the next time someone tells you literature is useless.”
― Arnold Weinstein

“..the brave picture we have of humans as rational beings is utterly misleading, a kind of photograph of our surface composure and thus unreflective of-- and unattuned to-- the seismic emotional and psychic reality underneath, our true reality... The arts put onto the page or the stage or the canvas or the screen a special portraiture that does justice to our depths.”
― Arnold Weinstein, A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life

“Art is light.”
― Arnold Weinstein, A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life

“the failure of communication is more often existential than merely lingual. Is there anything more miraculous than the unsimple event of words becoming”
― Arnold Weinstein, The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing

“Through art we discover that we are not alone.”
― Arnold Weinstein, A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life

“Touch alters/annihilates all pretensions of individual sovereignty and hegemony, cashiers any notion of an integral self, an atomic individual, busts wide open the closed doors of the “central I-Am’s private own.” We cannot fail to see that American individualism itself is on the block here, and is in trouble, is exposed as a precarious construct—yes, the armored nuclear self is a construct—slated for destruction by the most elemental act in human (and political and racial and sexual) life: touch. Perhaps the most striking feature of this stupendous passage is the strange”
― Arnold Weinstein, Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison

“Well, how do you understand things or people? It is a question Shreve himself asks, and then answers by referring precisely to Sutpen’s opposite number, the little dream-woman Rosa Coldfield: “What was it the old dame, the Aunt Rosa, told you about how there are some things that just have to be whether they are or not, have to be a damn sight more than some other things that maybe”
― Arnold Weinstein, Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison

“of the Second Amendment: we are endowed with words as our most intimate and overlooked form of power; these are the arms we bear.”
― Arnold Weinstein, The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing

“alters/annihilates all pretensions of individual”
― Arnold Weinstein, Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison

“Here is a terrifying system-wide purview: crime, disease, environment, and politics all obey a heinous logic of unknowable dormancy, so that we know them only when they explode, when they present the bill, when the damage is done. It is the damage that constitutes our knowing.”
― Arnold Weinstein, The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing

“just”
― Arnold Weinstein, Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison

“ideology is utterly invisible, that our enmeshment within it is profoundly if unknowingly consensual. Blake’s most explosive formula is found in his poem “London,” when he states what he hears on every street of the city: “mind forged manacles.” It can’t be better said: the true incarceration, the true penal work of culture, is an inside job, done every day one lives. In Blake you hear it.”
― Arnold Weinstein, Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books