Quotes from Robert Pogue Harrison

If nothing else, a house is a place to keep books in.

Human beings, in other words, are always already dead. This proleptic knowledge of finitude predetermines their most creative as well as their most destructive dispositions.

Walls protect, divide, distinguish; above all they abstract . The basic activities that sustain life . . . take place beyond walls.

Soul and habitat--we are finally in a position to know this--are correlates of one another.

Irony that does not deem itself ironic is the most dangerous irony of all.

And nothing . . . disquiets a rationalist more than a forest.

Walls, no less than writing, define civilization. They are monuments of resistance against time, like writing itself. . .

Decadence begins with the loss of restraint.

The destructive impulse with respect to nature all too often has psychological causes that go beyond the greed for material resource or the need to domesticate an environment. There is too often a deliberate rage and vengefulness at work in the assault on nature and its species, as if one would project onto the natural world the intolerable anxieties of finitude which hold humanity hostage to death.

T]here exists an allegiance between the dead and the unborn of which we the living are merely the ligature.

The forests were foris, 'outside.' In them lived the outcasts, the mad, the lovers, brigands, hermits, saints, lepers, the paquis, fugitives, misfits, the persecuted, wild men. Where else could they go? Outside of the law and human society one was in the forest. But the forest's asylum was unspeakable. One could not remain human in the forest; one could only rise above or sink below the human level.