Sherif Ali

“Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder.”
― Harold Bloom

“I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.”
― E. L. Doctorow

“The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves...The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.”
― Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost

“Beautiful lives women live—women do. In very breathing they draw meat and drink from some beautiful attenuation of unreality in which the shades and shapes of facts—of birth and bereavement, of suffering and bewilderment and despair—move with the substanceless decorum of lawn party charades, perfect in gesture and without significance or any ability to hurt.”
― William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!