Kevin Birmingham

“What's uncanny about censorship in a liberal society is that sooner or later the government's goal is not just to ban objectionable books. It is to act as if they don't exist. The bans themselves should, whenever possible, remain secret, which is to say that the ideal censorship is a recursion of silence.”
― Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses

“He believed that touching the limits of human experience was something he shared with the Prophet Muhammad, who was also reputedly epileptic. Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin notes that Muhammad’s ecstasy took the form of a mythical white creature who whisked the prophet away “to survey all the dwellings of Allah” in the split second it took a jug of water to spill to the ground. That experience, Prince Myshkin says, is how he first grasped the biblical verse “time shall be no more.” Dostoevsky was describing an “ecstatic aura,” a phenomenon that researchers now realize affects some people with temporal lobe epilepsy.”
― Kevin Birmingham, The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece