T.D. Elliott

“...no mind ever grew fat on a diet of novels. The pleasure which they occasionally offer is far too heavily paid for: they undermine the finest characters. They teach us to think ourselves into other men's places. Thus we acquire a taste for change. The personality becomes dissolved in pleasing figments of imagination. The reader learns to understand every point of view. Willingly he yields himself to the pursuit of other people's goals and loses sight of his own. Novels are so many wedges which the novelist, an actor with his pen, inserts into the closed personality of the reader. The better he calculates the size of the wedge and the strength of the resistance, so much the more completely does he crack open the personality of the victim. Novels should be prohibited by the State.”
― Elias Canetti

“We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“I am sadly afraid that I must have done some wicked thing.”
― Antisthenes Pinto

“Genuine tragedy is a case not of right against wrong but of right against right — two equally justified ethical principles embodied in people of unchangeable will.”
― Georg Friedrich Händel