Quotes from Arnold Weinstein

the brave picture we have of humans as rational beings is utterly misleading, a kind of photograph of our surface composure and thus unreflective of-- and unattuned to-- the seismic emotional and psychic reality underneath, our true reality... The arts put onto the page or the stage or the canvas or the screen a special portraiture that does justice to our depths.

Through art we discover that we are not alone.

How much do you know about Shakespeare?'' I once asked a friend who has committed much of her life to studying the Bard. She replied, ''Not as much as he knows about me''. Remember this the next time someone tells you literature is useless.

alters/annihilates all pretensions of individual

Well, how do you understand things or people? It is a question Shreve himself asks, and then answers by referring precisely to Sutpen's opposite number, the little dream-woman Rosa Coldfield: "What was it the old dame, the Aunt Rosa, told you about how there are some things that just have to be whether they are or not, have to be a damn sight more than some other things that maybe

Here is a terrifying system-wide purview: crime, disease, environment, and politics all obey a heinous logic of unknowable dormancy, so that we know them only when they explode, when they present the bill, when the damage is done. It is the damage that constitutes our knowing.

of the Second Amendment: we are endowed with words as our most intimate and overlooked form of power; these are the arms we bear.

the failure of communication is more often existential than merely lingual. Is there anything more miraculous than the unsimple event of words becoming