Intertextuality Quotes

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“They’re dead words—a human chain reaching back ten thousand years,” said the corpse. “How did they feel?”
“Genuinely sad, bordering on very funny,” said God.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full-stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.”
― Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language

“A special kind of relationship happened between an artist and a piece of art, on account of the investment. Sometimes it was an emotional investment. The subject matter meant something to the artist, making every stroke of the brush weightier than it looked. It might be a technical investment. It was a new method, a hard angle, an artistic challenge that meant no success on the canvas could be taken for granted. And sometimes it was simply the sheer investment of time. Art took hours, days, weeks, years, of single-minded focus. This investment meant that everything that touched the art-making experience got absorbed. Music, conversations, or television shows experienced during the making became part of the piece, too. Hours, days, weeks, years later, the memory of one could instantly invoke the memory of the other, because they had been inextricably joined.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible

“We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we're left with this cluttered world of language.”
― Chuck Palanhiuk

“Anitra! Evas naturlige datter!
Magnetiskt jeg drages; ti jeg er mann
og, som det står hos en aktet forfatter
das ewige weibliche zieht uns an!”
― Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt

“Most everything is a knockoff of something else. Once you get the idea, everything you see, read, taste or smell becomes an allusion to it. It's the art of transforming things.”
― Richard F. Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters

“A poet without memory, said Marconi, is like a criminal and nearly undone by feelings of decency. A poet without memory is an oxymoron. Because the poet is the memory of the language.”
― Ricardo Piglia, Respiración artificial

“It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for example, wrote the following (Part I, Chapter IX):

...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.

This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the "ingenious layman" Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.

History, the mother of truth! - the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as delving into reality but as the very font of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not "what happened"; it is what we believe happened. The final phrases - exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor - are brazenly pragmatic.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote

“In that moment, I realized how dangerous it was to keep company with the characters from books. They lived books lives of fierce deeds and deep yearning.”
― Jeffrey Ford, Ahab's Return: A Haunting Moby-Dick Retelling – Captain Ahab Hunts Ishmael in Gothic 1800s New York

“All literally works [...] are 'rewritten', if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them; indeed there is no reading of a work which is not also a 're-writing'.”
― Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction