Quotes by Edmund Wilson

“No matter how thoroughly and searchingly we may have scrutinized works of literature from the historical and biographical point of view, we must be able to tell good from bad, the first-rate from the second-rate. We shall otherwise not write literary criticism at all, but merely social or political history as reflected in literary texts, or psychological case histories from past eras.”

“At 60 the sexual preoccupation, when it hits you, seems sometimes sharper, as if it were an elderly malady, like gout.”

“If I could only remember that the days were, not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart.”

“The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.”

“The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations -- like that of artistic imagination.”

“There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.”

“Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine.”

“The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.”

No two persons ever read the same book.

No two person, ever read the same book.

He believes, but he does not believe: the impossibility of believing is the impossibility which he accepts most reluctantly, but still it is there with the other impossibilities of this world which is too full of weeping for a child to understand.

I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.

What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience.

Capitalism has run its course, and we shall have to look for other ideals than the ones that capitalism has encouraged.

I think with my right hand.