Jargon marks the place where thinking has been. It becomes a kind of macro, to use a computer term: a way of storing a complicated sequence of thinking operations under a unique name.
Marjorie GarberWell named, Quotology contains everything you always wanted to know about quotations, quoters, quotees, quotation books, 'quoox' (quotations out of context), and their fascinating history.
Marjorie GarberDog love is not the special realm of childhood or of boyhood, no matter what the movies keep telling us. It is highly significant, I think, that at both ends of human life span the bond between human and dog speaks with an insistent clarity - if we have the ears to hear.
Marjorie GarberA study conducted by the State University of New York at Buffalo Medical School suggested that in times of stress a dog is likely to be more help in calming you down than a spouse or partner. Most dog owners can guess the reason why: dogs never judge us and never compete with us.
Marjorie GarberThey offer, if we are wise enough or simple enough to take it, a model for what it means to give your heart with little thought of return. Both powerfully imaginary and comfortingly real, dogs act as mirrors for our own beliefs about what would constitute a truly humane society. Perhaps it is not too late for them to teach us some new tricks.
Marjorie GarberWe do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This refusal, indeed, is literature's most moral act. At a time when meanings are manifold, disparate, and always changing, the rich possibility of interpretation--the happy resistance of the text to ever be fully known and mastered--is one of the most exhilarating products of human culture.
Marjorie Garber