Eric Spreng

“The literary critic Helen Vendler writes that “treating fictions as moral pep-pills or moral emetics is repugnant to anyone who realizes the complex psychological and moral motives of a work of art.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“the fact that both of these hostile camps could make use of the same examples to prove diametrically opposed interpretations suggests a truth about how all of us read and interpret literary texts—one that is, possibly, rooted in the mysteries of human nature itself. Where some people see chaos and incoherence, others will find sense and symmetry and wholeness.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“beauty and pleasure are at the center of teaching. For the best teacher is the one who wants you to find meaning in the things that have given him pleasure, too, so that the appreciation of their beauty will outlive him. In this way—because it arises from an acceptance of the inevitability of death—good teaching is like good parenting.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“With a freedom unavailable to me as a historian, my imagination was feeding off history that I had written.”
― Nell Irvin Painter, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over