Eric Spreng

“One of the strange things about teaching is that you can never know what your effect will be on others; can never know, if you have something to teach, who your real students will be, the ones who will take what you have to give and make it their own—“what you have to give” being, in no small part, what you yourself learned from some other teacher, someone who wondered whether you would absorb what she had to give, someone who is, by the time you’re old enough to write about the experience, as old as your parents, perhaps even dead—can never really know which of the young people clustered around the seminar table is someone whom the teacher or the text has touched so deeply, for whatever reason, that the lesson will live beyond the classroom, beyond you.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“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

“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