Quotes About Author

I don't have any of the answers, son. Never did. All I can do is keep asking the questions. Keep trying to make sense of why people do what they do.

In fact, all known societies above the very primitive level have been slave societies—even many of the Northwest American Indian tribes had slaves long before Columbus's voyage.46 Amid this universal slavery, only one civilization ever rejected human bondage: Christendom. And it did it twice!

There is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning, as is praise.

If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics...

If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundation of knowledge in mathematics.

if charity begins at home, empire begins in other men's homes.

Constantinople is a city larger than its renown proclaims. May God in his grace and generosity deign to make it the capital of Islam.

I once informed a leading evangelical theologian that his newly published systematic theology is thoroughly Arminian even though he never uses the term. His response was, "Yes, but don't tell anyone!

I don't expect to try to get people to like everything I do. I want them to respect what I do.

Meow!" said the chicken.

Kitsch is a sentimentalization of reality in response to cultural failure. The greater the failure, the more malignant the sentimentalization.

His past, again like Dali's, had to be mythologised. For, let's face it, his lower-middle-class upbringing was not exactly Angela's Ashes

The Right to an Answer is a further anatomy of the Britain Burgess personally found waiting for him on his return from the East.

The great obstacle to the 'struggle toward clear vision of the universal' is the human trait that Mondrian variously calls 'individuality,' 'personality'... [p.73]

Modern science has killed the Fantastic, and with the Fantastic, Poetry—which is also Fantasy. The last Fairy is well and truly buried—or dried, like a rare flower, between two pages of Monsieur Balzac.

Mathematical truth is not determined arbitrarily by the rules of some 'man-made' formal system, but has an absolute nature, and lies beyond any such system of specifiable rules.

Somehow, consciousness is needed in order to handle situations where we have to form new judgements, and where the rules have not been laid down beforehand.

About the Author Winner of a Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, a Peabody Award, an Emmy, and two Polk awards, ROGER ROSENBLATT is University Professor of Writing at Long Island University Southampton College. He writes essays for Time magazine and for The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. He lives in Manhattan and Quogue, Long Island.

the scenes and moments that elbow their way to positions of prominence.

Do you work for the government, any government?" "I pay taxes, which means I work for the government, part of the time. Yes.

Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.

If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand.

The Text is without a source -- the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.

The goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text.