Claudette Althoff

“cannot, with Nietzsche and with Pater, believe that life can only be appreciated as an aesthetic phenomenon. But I wish to believe that, and perhaps Judaic tradition blocks me from it. Wisdom needs to be added to aesthetic splendor and cognitive power as the three stigmata or criteria of knowledge or value. But where except in Shakespeare are all three to be discovered consistently?”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“it is one of the consequences of aggression that it hardens the conscience, as the only means of quieting it.”
― James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer

“My heart aches, a drowsy numbness pains as if of hemlock I had drunk."

Ode To A NIghtengale, John Keats”
― Barbara Sontheimer

“The games are always been played, and no one plays the games like me. You just have to be the best.
And I usually am.”
― Irvine Welsh, Filth