Roger Rosenblatt
Quotes by Roger Rosenblatt
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If you're going to believe in God, if you're going to take that leap of faith, as I do, then the God that seems the most comprehensible to me would be the God who set us spinning and said 'Good luck.'
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Whatever brief delights it provides, mere strangeness in poetry and prose eventually leaves us cold, especially when we suspect the writer is stretching for effect to avoid the actual life before his eyes.
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Every writing teacher gives the subliminal message, every time they teach: 'Your life counts for something.' In no other subject that I know of is that message given.
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The only reason I wanted 'Making Toast' as the title is that it is a simple gesture of moving on. Every morning there's the bread and you make the toast and you start the day.
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Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening.
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No writer besides Shakespeare has created more memorable characters attached to vices and virtues. In even their least sympathetic characters, one senses a kind of helplessness to passion quivering between the poles of good and evil.
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There is nothing like a man for bringing out the animal in an animal.
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One senses, in all autobiography, a straining toward perfection, perfection of a kind that connects the individual with a cosmic pattern which, because it is perfect in itself, verifies that individuals own potential perfection.
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There may be no more pleasing picture in the world than that of a child peering into a book-the past and the future entrancing each other.
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A five-year old is in a pretty good position to assess who is beautiful and who is not. Removed from the confusions of sexuality, he or she can judge a face as a face.
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The Constitution is more than literature, but as literature, it is primarily a work of the imagination. It imagined a country: fantastic. More fantastic still, it imagined a country full of people imagining themselves.
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Slum kids die slowly, their lives eroded at so languid a pace that even they would have trouble tracing the disintegration. To the children of war death explodes like a car bomb.
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One of the very important things that have to be learned around the time dying becomes a real prospect is to recognize those occasions when we have been useful in the world.
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Whatever you think matters - doesn't. Follow this rule, and it will add decades to your life.
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Uncle Scrooge preferred to let the poor die and decrease the surplus population. Scrooge may not have had God on his side, but his arithmetic was impeccable.
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Blame is especially useful in situations in which there is no apparent villain-those moments that prove, despite our advancement of learning, how susceptible we are to high winds and wet roads.
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Anytime you make a person into something other than himself, you make a monster.
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Children love to be alone because alone is where they know themselves, and where they dream.
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Time can be such a menace to a man. By this age do that; by that age do better.
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For those at home, as well as for those in battle, war is curiously disabling. The mere realization that one's country is at war poisons the bloodstream, creates an incessant mood of worry that infiltrates even the most casual moments.
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