Scott Cripps

“I feel separated and cut off from the world around me, but occasionally I've felt that it was really a part of me, and I hope I'll have that feeling again, and that next time it won't go away. That's a dim, misty outline of the story that's told so often, of how man once lived in a golden age or a garden of Eden or the Hesperides ... how that world was lost, and how we some day may be able to get it back again. ... This story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.”
― Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination

“Whatever noblest things the mind received,
More and more foreign matter spoils the theme;
And when the good of this world is achieved,
What’s better seems an idle dream.
That gave us our life, the noblest urges
Are petrified in the earth’s vulgar surges”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

“She had a great many opinions, but taken together they did not add up to a point of view.”
― V. S. Naipul

“A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, "How could I have lived without reading it!" and also, "What a pity I did not read it in my youth!" Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading.”
― Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar