Lavender’s Reviews > The Idiot > Status Update

“The point is in life, in life alone—in discovering it, constantly and eternally, and not at all in the discover itself… there always remains something which it is quite impossible to convey to other people, though you may fill whole volumes with writing and spend 35 years trying to explain your thought; you will die with it, not having conveyed to anyone what is perhaps most important in your idea.” (395).

“… because this poem directly portrays a man capable of having an ideal and, second, once he bas the ideal, of believing in it and, believing in it, of blindly devoting his whole life to it. That doesn’t always happen in our time.” 249.

“A fool with a heart and no brains is as unhappy a fool as a fool with brains but no heart. An old truth. I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.” (81)