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Authors:

Stephen Greenblatt quotes

American Critic November 7, 1943

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Quotes

A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet. Stephen Greenblatt
I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life, even though I've just written a biography! Stephen Greenblatt
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man. Stephen Greenblatt
I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about. Stephen Greenblatt
It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing. Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt quote: "Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic..."
Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life. Stephen Greenblatt
They were an elite, living at the center of the world's greatest power, and one of their most cherished privileges was the cultivation of the life of the mind. Stephen Greenblatt
What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off. Stephen Greenblatt
Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare's way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but one lived out in his own life. Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt quote: "The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion."
The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. Stephen Greenblatt
Independence & self-reliance had no cultural purchase; indeed, they could scarcely be conceived, let alone prized...The best course was humbly to accept the identity to which destiny assigned you: the ploughman needed only to know how to plough, the weaver to weave, the monk to pray. Stephen Greenblatt
What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books. Stephen Greenblatt
There was a time in the ancient world - a very long time - in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one's head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst. Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked... Stephen Greenblatt
I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough. Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt quote: "In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in..."
In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough. Stephen Greenblatt

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