Quotes from Jane Ellen Harrison

The ritual dance was a dromenon, a thing to be done, not a thing to be looked at.

The idle mind, which demands rules, i.e. recipes for making correct sentences, and shirks the subtler task of understanding the speaker's point of view and living into his emotion will never either use or understand aspects aright. If the speaker is living into the action, sympathizing with it, he will use imperfective, if he stands outside and merely states a fact or a judgment he will instinctively use the perfective

M. Jacques Rivière appears to know no Russian and says no words of 'aspects', but what he explains as his meaning is simply this, that the Russian novel is written in the imperfective, written from within not without, lived not thought about. This modern Russian method is to M. Rivière the exact opposite of symbolist work, where everything is known beforehand, everything achieved then thought or felt about from outside and above.

It is this living into things that a new generation demands, and it is this, because she is young among the nations, that Russia has to offer.

There is a little dull ache for Oblomov and his dreams. Man does not live by bread alone, not even by the most wholesome bread punctually served. There is dream-stuff as well as bread-stuff. Sometimes man's strength is to sit still.

Language is the un conscious or at least subconscious product of the group, the herd, the race, the nation. Literature is the product more or less conscious of the individual genius, using of course the tools made by the blind herd, but, after the manner of living organisms, shaping these tools even as he uses them.

It is part of the great spiritual riches of the Russian that, because he sees or rather feels things living from the inside (imperfective) he sees or rather feels things whole (asyndeta). It is a corollary from his living into things, for life is durée unanalysed, undistributed. These asyndeta , these bits of life so closely bound together that they refuse conjunctions, are countless in Russian, specially in epic and peasant Russian.

To take a single and salient instance, to study the folk-epos of Russia, alive in the mouths of the people up to and beyond the time of Peter the Great, is to look at Homer with new and wider opened eyes.

Youth is, I believe, contrary to all tradition, the time when Rational Thought dominates and allures. It is because they turned on the world the eager clear-eyed curiosity of a noble child that the Greeks are always young and their language essentially the language of youth.

The Russian verb is weak in tenses, strong in Aspects. [...] These aspects are in the very blood of the Slav. [...] These aspects I believe to be of profound psychological significance and this significance has not I think so far been fully understood.

Aspect or quality of a verb had, I believe, nothing originally to do with time; aspect in fact cuts clean across time. Aspect in most languages is now at least indicated for the most part by adverbs. I run — quickly; I stand — still; in this sense many verbs have hundreds of aspects.

The English language like the English people is good at particular emergencies, but hopelessly unsystematic.

So holy was the Bull that nothing unlucky might come near him; the youths and maidens must have both their parents alive, they must not have been under the taboo, the infection, of death.

Again a great procession is led forth, the senate and the priests walk in it, and with them come representatives of each class of the State—children and young boys, and youths just come to manhood, epheboi, as the Greeks called them.

He dies because he is so holy, that he may give his holiness, his strength, his life, just at the moment it is holiest, to his people.

But sacrifice does not mean "death" at all.

If I could have my life over again, I would devote it not to art or literature, but to language. Life itself may hit one hard, but always, always one can take sanctuary in language. Language is as much an art and as sure a refuge as paint¬ ing or music or literature. It reflects and interprets and makes bearable life; only it is a wider, because more subconscious, life.

It was worth many hardships to see forty German professors try to mount forty recalcitrant mules. My own horseman¬ ship, as already hinted, is nothing to " write home about ", but compared to those German professors I am a centaur.

But it was not to give him up to the gods that they killed him, not to "sacrifice" him in our sense, but to have him, keep him, eat him, live by him and through him, by his grace.

So this intense desire uttered itself in the dromenon of his resurrection.

He must live again, he should, he did.

The upper classes worshipped then, as now, not the Spirit of Spring but their own ancestors.

The epic poet is all taken up with what he called klea andron, "glorious deeds of men," of individual heroes; and what these heroes themselves ardently long and pray for is just this glory, this personal distinction, this deathless fame for their great deeds.

The Dithyramb was the Song and Dance of the New Birth.