Quotes from Frank Kermode

the buoyancy of chiliasts

Having compared the novel-reader with an infant and a primitive, one can go further and call him a psychopath; and this I shall shortly be doing.

you can't get rid of Shakespeare without abolishing the very notion of literature.

It is ourselves we encounter whenever we invent fictions.

The books which seal off the long perspectives, which sever us from our losses, which represent the world of potency as a world of act, these are the books which, when the drug wears off, go on to the dump with the other empty bottles. Those that continue to interest us move through time to an end, an end we must sense even if we cannot know it; they live in change, until, which is never, as and is are one.

I suppose it would be better if one were aggressive, contentious and so on. But there's rarely any occasion to be savage.

It is not expected of critics that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.