Quotes from Adam Kirsch

The unadmitted reason why traditional readers are hostile to e-books is that we still hold the superstitious idea that a book is like a soul, and that every soul should have its own body.

Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word 'myth' only for stories we ourselves cannot believe.

During that long span of time, then, Jewish history would have to be written in other ways. It would become the story not of power, but of ideas and beliefs. And its most important turning points would not be the winning of wars or the building of monuments, but the writing of books.

Theory sometimes seems to me a way of taking revenge on literature—the critic masters the text and rewrites it in his own image, instead of submitting to it and listening to what it has to say. The aggressive ungainliness of so much academic writing about literature is a sign of this—it is unliterary writing about literature, which should be a contradiction in terms.

Today, the poetics of authenticity is securely established. There have been isolated dissents from it, but no comprehensive rejection. Yet it should be clear by now that this poetics has thoroughly failed. It has made it more difficult for poets to produce major work, and its critical legacy is remarkable only for intellectual crudity and rhetorical violence. The sound of the critical madhouse is a thousand utterly authentic voices, all talking at once.

The lesson Arendt drew was that a beautiful soul is not enough, for it was precisely the soul for which life showed no consideration. To live fully and securely, every human being needs what Arendt calls specificity, the social and political status that comes with full membership in a community.

You shall love the Lord your God . . . with all your might," the Tsenerene interprets to mean "with all your resources": "You should love God with your money. Your money should not be more beloved to you than a mitzvah." It goes on to tell the story

Drakuli? titled her book "They Would Never Hurt a Fly," after Arendt's description of a typical Nazi functionary who "does not regard himself as a murderer because he has not done it out of inclination but in his professional capacity. Out of sheer passion he would never do harm to a fly.