Daanish Shabbir

“Since ideology, particularly in it's shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony, I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading. ... But with this principle, I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures.”
― Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why

“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Deeply ambivalent also is the image of fire in carnival. It is a fire
that simultaneously destroys and renews the world. In European
carnivals there was almost always a special structure (usually a vehicle
adorned with all possible sorts of gaudy carnival trash) called "hell,"
and at the close of carnival this "hell" was triumphantly set on fire
(sometimes this carnival "hell" was ambivalently linked with a horn
of plenty). Characteristic is the ritual of "moccoli" in Roman carnival:
each participant in the carnival carried a lighted candle ("a candle
stub"), and each tried to put out another's candle with the cry "Sia
ammazzato!" ("Death to thee!"). In his famous description of Roman
carnival (in Italienische Reise)h Goethe, striving to uncover the deeper
meaning behind carnival images, relates a profoundly symbolic
little scene: during "moccoli" a boy puts out his father's candle with
the cheerful carnival cry: "Sia ammazzato il Signore Padre!" [that is,
"death to thee, Signor Father!"]”
― Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”
― Robertson Davies