Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.

Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.

Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.

Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.

Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.

As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith