Abe

“Like the boy who drives his little Indian pigs to the fold, whose obstinacy impels them divers ways, and thus obliges him first to apply to one and then to another till he can succeed in penning them all, so are we obliged to play the same game with the personages of our story.”
― Alessandro Manzoni, The Bethrothed

“Oh, oh!' said Renzo, 'you are a poet!'

To comprehend this witticism of poor Renzo, it is necessary to be informed, that in the eyes of the vulgar of Milan, and more particularly in its environs, the name of poet did not signify, as among cultivated people, a sublime genius, an inhabitant of Pindus, a pupil of the muses, but a whimsicality and eccentricity in discourse and conduct, which had more of singularity than sense; and an absurd wresting of words from their legitimate signification.”
― Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed

“The grandeur of [great artists] works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generation of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.”
― William Hazlitt, The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things

“Must poor old Homer father a lot of esoteric things? Is the Iliad to have four or five layers of meaning, one below the other, like a pile of sandwiches? This digging up of unsuspected meanings goes too far. It spoils a poem to be all the time spading it or boring through its imagery with a steam drill. These critics spend too much of their time underground, and they look pale and unwholesome when they come up. And it often happens that what they bring up is something they have dropped themselves. There are commentators who have been digging all their lives and come up with their own pocket handkerchief. They expect you to be glad about it. They think a poet, like a dog, no sooner happens on a good thing than he wants to bury it.”
― Frank Moore Colby, Imaginary Obligations