I Ask Of Literature Precisely Those Things

In The Beginning The Gods Made Man, And Fashioned The Sky And The Sea, And The Earth's Fair Face For Man's Dwelling-place, And This Was The Gods' Decree: "lo, We Have Given To Man Five Wits: He Discerneth Folly And Sin; He Is Swift To Deride All The World Outside, And Blind To The World Within: So That Man May Make Sport And Amuse Us, In Battling For Phrases Or Pelf, Now That Each May Know What Forebodeth Woe To His Neighbor, And Not To Himself.

The Man Was Not Merely Very Human; He Was Humanity. And I Reflected That It Is Only By Preserving Faith In Human Dreams That We May, After All, Perhaps Some Day Make Them Come True.

American Literature Was Enriched With Men Who Loved Allison .... Of The Actual And Eventual Worth Of This Romance I Cannot Pretend To Be An Unprejudiced Judge. The Tale Seems To Me One Of Those Many Books Which Have Profited, Very Dubiously Indeed, By Having Obtained, In One Way Of Another, The Repute Of Being Indecent.

A Book , Once It Is Printed And Published, Becomes Individual. It Is By Its Publication As Decisively Severed From Its Author As In Parturition A Child Is Cut Off From Its Parent. The Book "means" Thereafter, Perforce, Both Grammatically And Actually, Whatever Meaning This Or That Reader Gets Out Of It.

Some Few There Must Be In Every Age And Every Land Of Whom Life Claims Nothing Very Insistently Save That They Write Perfectly Of Beautiful Happenings.