“It happens that in our phase of civility, the novel is the central form of literary art. It lends itself to explanations… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The formerly absolute distinction between time and eternity in Christian thought--between nunc movens with its beginning and end, and nunc stans, the… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The discords of our experience--delight in change, fear of change; the death of the individual and the survival of the species, the… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“What, then, can Shakespearean tragedy, on this brief view, tell us about human time in an eternal world? It offers imagery of… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“At some very low level, we all share certain fictions about time, and they testify to the continuity of what is called… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“IT is worth remembering that the rise of what we call literary fiction happened at a time when the revealed, authenticated account… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“Bohr is really doing what the Stoic allegorists did to close the gap between their world and Homer's, or what St. Augustine… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The history of interpretation, the skills by which we keep alive in our minds the light and dark of past literature and… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“here is one other element of the apocalyptic tradition to be considered, namely transition. I said a minute ago that one of… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The first phase of modernism, which so far as the English language goes we associate with Pound and Yeats, Wyndham Lewis and Eliot and… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“It is already the fashion to diminish Eliot by calling him derivative, the mouthpiece of Pound, and so forth; and yet if one wanted… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“I suppose it would be better if one were aggressive, contentious and so on. But there's rarely any occasion to be savage.” — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with medieval apocalypse… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The novel, then, provides a reduction of the world different from that of the treatise. It has to lie. Words, thoughts, patterns of word… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The books which seal off the long perspectives, which sever us from our losses, which represent the world of potency as a world of… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The discords of our experience--delight in change, fear of change; the death of the individual and the survival of the species, the pains and… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the shift towards… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near. Consequently the historical allegory is always having to be revised;… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“You sometimes hear people say, with a certain pride in their clerical resistance to the myth, that the nineteenth century really ended not in… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
