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Edmund Wilson
6 quotes
“There is really no way of considering a book independently of one's special sensations in reading it on a particular occasion. In this as in everything else one must allow a certain relativity. In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.”
Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Triple Thinkers (1938), Preface, p. ix, [ 1948 Oxford University Press edition]
“Education, the last hope of the liberal in all periods.”
Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) first seen 1145 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: To the Finland Station : A Study in the Acting and Writing of History (1940), Part I, Ch. 5: Michelet Between Nationalism and Socialism, p. 36, [1972 Farrar Straus & Giroux edition, /1145]
“It may be that there is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.”
Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), Ch. 4, p. 136, [New York Review Books Classics (2004)]
“Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.”
Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) first seen 1843 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), Ch. 5, p. 340, [New York Review Books Classics (2004)]; Karl Marx, in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843-4), wrote "Religion…is the opium of the people" ("Die Religion…ist…
“I believe, that certain people — especially, perhaps, in Britain — have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash. … You can see it in the tone they fall into when they talk about Tolkien in print: they bubble, they squeal, they coo; they go on about Malory and Spenser — both of whom have a charm and a distinction that Tolkien has never touched. As for me, if we must read about imaginary kingdoms, give me James Branch Cabell's Poictesme. He at least writes for grown-up people, and he does not present the drama of life as a showdown between Good People and Goblins. He can cover more ground in an episode that lasts only three pages than Tolkien is able to in one of this twenty-page chapters, and he can create a more disquieting impression by a reference to something that is never described than Tolkien through his whole demonology.”
Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) first seen 1956 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Oo, Those Awful Orcs!" : A review of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Nation (14 April 1956)
“The more I have thought about Figures of Earth — and its sequel The Silver Stallion — the more remarkable they have come to seem. Looking back, one can now understand the abrupt fluctuations of Cabell's fame. … Published when Cabell was forty-two, the chronicle of Manuel the Redeemer was not a book for the Young nor was it a book in the mood of the twenties. The story of the ambitious man of action who is cowardly, malignant and treacherous and who does not even enjoy very much what his crimes and double-dealing have won him, but who is rapidly, after his death, transformed into a great leader, a public benefactor and a saint, has the fatal disadvantage for a novel that the reader finds no inducement to identify himself with its central figure. Yet I am now not sure that this merciless chronicle in which all the values are negative except the naked human will, is not one of the best things of its kind in literature — on a plane, perhaps, with Flaubert and Swift.”
Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) first seen 1897 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: James Branch Cabell 1897 - 1958" (1958), later published in The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle Of 1950-1965 (1966), p. 322