Rosenblatt Quotes

#1. Who the hell knows where they get these farkakte names for their kids. One of Rita's friends named her son Bodhisattva. Bodhisattva Rosenblatt. Can you imagine? Rita always says, 'It's no big deal. They call him 'Bodi', is all.' Please. And the newspapers say I'm abusive to children?

Susan Jane Gilman

#2. The God I do believe in is the God who doesn't care: James Joyce's God who stands back, paring his fingernails.

Roger Rosenblatt

#3. The best in art and life comes from a center - something urgent and powerful, an idea or emotion that insists on its being. From that insistence, a shape emerges and creates its structure out of passion. If you begin with a structure, you have to make up the passion, and that's very hard to do.

Roger Rosenblatt

#4. No writer besides Shakespeare has created more memorable characters attached to vices and virtues. In even their least sympathetic characters, one senses a kind of helplessness to passion quivering between the poles of good and evil.

Roger Rosenblatt

#5. The only reason I wanted 'Making Toast' as the title is that it is a simple gesture of moving on. Every morning there's the bread and you make the toast and you start the day.

Roger Rosenblatt

#6. Why do we write?
"To make suffering endurable
To make evil intelligible
To make justice desirable
and . . . to make love possible

Roger Rosenblatt

#7. Children love to be alone because alone is where they know themselves, and where they dream.

Roger Rosenblatt

#8. Only by moving in the direction you least trust can you be saved

Roger Rosenblatt

#9. If you're going to believe in God, if you're going to take that leap of faith, as I do, then the God that seems the most comprehensible to me would be the God who set us spinning and said 'Good luck.'

Roger Rosenblatt

#10. Time can be such a menace to a man. By this age do that; by that age do better.

Roger Rosenblatt

#11. I think there must be something wrong with me as a writer. Because all my friends who are writers find reasons to hate everything about their day. But I just love writing. I love starting the day with language and seeing if I can make something of it.

Roger Rosenblatt

#12. A five-year old is in a pretty good position to assess who is beautiful and who is not. Removed from the confusions of sexuality, he or she can judge a face as a face.

Roger Rosenblatt

#13. A library should be like a pair of open arms.

Roger Rosenblatt

#14. Whatever brief delights it provides, mere strangeness in poetry and prose eventually leaves us cold, especially when we suspect the writer is stretching for effect to avoid the actual life before his eyes.

Roger Rosenblatt

#15. The belief in potential human virtue underlies the whole idea of the Bill of Rights; the document is a very tough guardian of that belief.

Roger Rosenblatt

#16. If the sad truth be known, writers, being the misfits we are, probably ought not to belong to families in the first place. We simply are too self-interested, though we may excuse the flaw by calling it 'focused.'

Roger Rosenblatt

#17. Death is something that happens to others, you think, until it happens to you.

Roger Rosenblatt

#18. One of the very important things that have to be learned around the time dying becomes a real prospect is to recognize those occasions when we have been useful in the world.

Roger Rosenblatt

#19. Live in the past, but don't remember too much.

Roger Rosenblatt

#20. Whatever you think matters - doesn't. Follow this rule, and you will add decades to your life.

Roger Rosenblatt

#21. Blame is especially useful in situations in which there is no apparent villain-those moments that prove, despite our advancement of learning, how susceptible we are to high winds and wet roads.

Roger Rosenblatt

#22. If a man spends enough time in a library, he may actually change his mind. I have seen it happen.

Roger Rosenblatt

#23. The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment and a particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-be-duplicated combination determine his response to the text.

Louise Rosenblatt

#24. Every writing teacher gives the subliminal message, every time they teach: 'Your life counts for something.' In no other subject that I know of is that message given.

Roger Rosenblatt

#25. Uncle Scrooge preferred to let the poor die "and decrease the surplus population." Scrooge may not have had God on his side, but his arithmetic was impeccable.

Roger Rosenblatt

#26. If you need three adjectives to describe something, then you've probably chosen the wrong something.

Roger Rosenblatt

#27. Remote control. Ingenious contradiction of terms. Fits like a handshake. Aims like a gun.

Roger Rosenblatt

#28. Text is just ink on a page until a reader comes along and gives it life.

Louise Rosenblatt

#29. Literature provides us with experiences it would not be wise or possible to introduce into our own world and thus enlarges our understanding of the world.

Louise Rosenblatt

#30. Friends are lights in winter; the older the friend, the brighter the light.

Roger Rosenblatt

#31. Anytime you make a person into something other than himself, you make a monster.

Roger Rosenblatt

#32. There is nothing like a man for bringing out the animal in an animal.

Roger Rosenblatt

#33. What is the difference between grief and mourning? Mourning has company.

Roger Rosenblatt

#34. Just because the person who criticizes you is an idiot doesn't make him wrong.

Roger Rosenblatt

#35. One senses, in all autobiography, a straining toward perfection, perfection of a kind that connects the individual with a cosmic pattern which, because it is perfect in itself, verifies that individuals own potential perfection.

Roger Rosenblatt

#36. The Constitution is more than literature, but as literature, it is primarily a work of the imagination. It imagined a country: fantastic. More fantastic still, it imagined a country full of people imagining themselves.

Roger Rosenblatt

#37. A poem is what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text and experiences as relevant to the text.

Louise Rosenblatt

#38. For those at home, as well as for those in battle, war is curiously disabling. The mere realization that one's country is at war poisons the bloodstream, creates an incessant mood of worry that infiltrates even the most casual moments.

Roger Rosenblatt

#39. The trick in foraging for a tooth lost in coffee grounds is not to be misled by the clumps. The only way to be sure is to rub each clump between your thumb and index finger, which makes a mess of your hands.

Roger Rosenblatt

#40. The God worth worshipping is the one who pays us the compliment of self - regulation, and we might return it by minding our own business.

Roger Rosenblatt

#41. The problem with death is absence

Roger Rosenblatt

#42. Come September, children return to school, grownups to work, and the brain to the head.

Roger Rosenblatt

#43. Books do not simply happen to people. People also happen to books.

Louise Rosenblatt

#44. Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening.

Roger Rosenblatt

#45. Slum kids die slowly, their lives eroded at so languid a pace that even they would have trouble tracing the disintegration. To the children of war death explodes like a car bomb.

Roger Rosenblatt