"A necessary strategy of literary criticism is to propose problems, and a necessary illusion is that those problems can be solved. But the problems and solutions are more often than not celebrations of the literature they address and gestures that would bring us closer to a past that is forever receding from us. The force of literature is at last magical, and the mysteries that we try to solve are the validations of its power."

John Edward Williams Literature See all quotes by John Edward Williams →

React to this quote

More by John Edward Williams

“Sometimes he stood in the center of the quad, looking at the five huge columns in front of Jesse Hall that thrust upward into the night out of the cool grass. ... Grayish silver in the moonlight, bare and pure, they seemed to him to represent the way of life he had embraced, as a temple represents a god.”

“He went out of the office into the darkness of the long corridor and walked heavily into the sunlight, into the open world that was like a prison wherever he turned.”

Resonant Thoughts

"God is not simply power, as most people were inclined to think. God is love, and he manifests himself in the dialectics of an impotent love. ... The emperor is not God. Jesus desacralizes that kind of…"

— Jon Sobrino

Religion1938

#religion

"Focus not only on identifying problems. Others will do that for you. Develop the skill of finding solutions to those problems. Do this and your stock will go up!"

— Danny Yamashiro

Politics1967

#change

"History doesn’t supersede evolution, it merely complicates it."

— David Rains Wallace

Literature1945

#history

"I decided that I was both a humanist and a liberal, each of the most dangerous and vilified type. I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create a reasonably decent…"

— James A. Michener

Literature1907–1997

#Human Nature