Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

It is by extending oneself, by exercising some capacity previously unused that you come to a better knowledge of your own potential.

I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.

Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence)

Literature is achieved anxiety.

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

Real reading is a lonely activity.