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“« But academics by nature are a solitary, sedentary lot. Travels sounds fun until you realize what you really want is to stay at home with a cup of tea and a stack of books by a warm fire. »
- R.F. Kuang, Babel or the necessity of violence”
― R.F Kuang

“Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Not only had his wife Anna made Dostoyevsky’s creations possible, but, in a way, Anna was the [female] ideal behind his creations.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another
manner or a new material his impression of
beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism
is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful
things are corrupt without being charming.
This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings
in beautiful things are the cultivated.
For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written.
That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of
Realism is the rage of Caliban
seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of
Romanticism is the rage of Caliban
not seeing his own face in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the
subject-matter of the artist, but the morality
of art consists in the perfect use of an im-
perfect medium.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even
things that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An
ethical sympathy in an artist is an un-
pardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist
can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist
instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials
for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all
the arts is the art of the musician. From the
point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the
Type.

All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at
their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at
their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really
Mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art
shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree, the artist is in accord
with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful
thing as long as he does not admire it. The
only excuse for making a useless thing is that
one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.”
― Oscar Wilde., The Picture of Dorian Gray