Quotes About Influence

No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespearean.

Spiritual power and spiritual authority notoriously shade over into both politics and poetry.

Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider.

If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.

The James family, raised by their Emersonian father, accepted their heritage, with reservations by Henry yet fewer by William.

Frye's influence on me lasted twenty years but came to an abrupt halt on my thirty-seventh birthday, July 11, 1967, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithyramb, "The Covering Cherub; or, Poetic Influence.

I regard Clarissa and In Search of Lost Time as the two most eminent of all novels, surpassing even Tolstoy and Dickens.

Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, tuned the English tongue.

Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left.

Without the Canon, we cease to think.

Clarissa Harlowe is a larger form than all the heroines of the Protestant will descended from her: Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, Anne Elliot; Hawthorne's Hester Prynne; George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke; Thomas Hardy's Sue Bridehead; Henry James's Isabel Archer, Milly Theale; D. H. Lawrence's Ursula Brangwen; E. M. Forster's Margaret Schlegel; and Virginia Woolf's Lily Briscoe.

What matters most (and it is the central point of this book) is that the anxiety of influence comes out of a complex act of strong misreading, a creative interpretation that I call poetic misprision.

He who controls the Central Highlands controls South Vietnam. —Vietnamese military maxim

good leadership revolves around good judgment. That is the defining characteristic of a good leader.

Moore also realized that a good leader is also a good listener.

To Lincoln, words always mattered most. Newspaper stories lived but a single day, caricatures flamed into view and just as quickly faded, and even the most flattering photographs inevitably receded behind the thick covers of family albums. But words lived forever. Writing, Lincoln believed, was "the great invention of the world.

So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses.... That proves something - that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children. ~To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 16, spoken by the character Atticus

Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hands of another.

If this thing's hushed up it'll be a simple denial to Jem of the way I've tried to raise him. Sometimes I think I'm a total failure as a parent, but I'm all they've got. Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I've tried to live so I can look squarely back at him.. if I connived at something like this, frankly I couldn't meet his eye, and the day I can't do that I'll know I've lost him. I don't want to lose him and Scout, because they're all I've got.

I should like to take your head apart, put a fact in it, and watch it go its way through the runnels of your brain until it comes out of your mouth.

You are too young to understand it," she said, "but sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of—oh, of your father.

If she was on the porch when we passed, we would be raked by her wrathful gaze, subjected to ruthless interrogation regarding our behaviour, and given a melancholy prediction on what we would amount to when we grew up, which was always nothing.

I should like to take your head apart, put a fact in it, and watch it go its way through the runnels of your brain until it comes out of your mouth. We were both born here, we went to the same schools, we were taught the same things. I wonder what you saw and heard.