Benjamin Moser Quotes

#1. I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.

Benjamin Moser

#2. A little girl's fantasies are one thing, and literature is another; just as numbers require rules to give them human meaning, words, too, demand a form to turn them into literature.

Benjamin Moser

#3. Like her friend and admirer Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst was a passionate explorer of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the obscene, and shows, in this discomfiting, hypnotic work, just how rarely those categories are what they seem. The translation is excellent - what a rare relief.

Benjamin Moser

#4. It's one thing if everyone wears the same shoes or drinks the same soda. But the world of literature is the last place in which globalization should mean homogeneity.

Benjamin Moser

#5. There is no right to punish. There is only the power to punish,' she wrote. 'A man is punished for his crime because the State is stronger than he; the great crime of War is not punished because beyond the individual there is mankind, and beyond mankind there is nothing at all.

Benjamin Moser

#6. Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not have talent; one can be called and not know how to go.

Benjamin Moser

#7. Clarice scrawled, 'A question from when I was a little girl that I can answer only now: are rocks made, or are they born? Answer: rocks are.

Benjamin Moser