[While] we have only one life, nevertheless that one life ("that massi — John Barth

"Marilyn Marsh, who had about had it with Spain, declared to him [the old Spanish man]: … But it redounds to your national credit, the then Missus Turner went on in effect — shed been reading up on reciprocal atrocities in the Guerra Civil — that the sunny Spanish could never be guilty of an Auschwitz, for example. In the first place, your ovens would have died, like our kitchen stove, instead of your Jews, whom youd got rid of anyhow in the sunny Fifteenth century, no? And in the second place the whole idea of extermination camps wouldve been too impersonal for your exquisite Moorish tastes. Much more agradable to push folks off a cliff one at a time into a gorgeous Mediterranean sunset, as you did near Malaga — three hundred, was it, or three thousand? Or to rape and then kill a convent-full of nuns in the manner of the saint of their choice — was that Barcelona or Valencia?"

"Consider that if the novelist is like God and a novel like the universe, then the converse ought to have at least some some metaphorical truth: The universe is a novel; God is a novelist! (I have observed elsewhere that the trouble with God is not that Hes a bad novelist; only that Hes a realistic one, and that dates Him.) [Footnote:] But also keeps bringing Him back into fashion."

"A "limited imagination," as I understand it, gets things wrong. From its mere incapacity, like limited intelligence or limited physical strength, it fails to anticipate accurately and to come up with the really new or more effective idea. Never mind that even the most powerful imagination may not be literally unlimited. … In the literary sphere, limited imagination is likely to be limited to the most conventional and obvious: a mere lack of originality in the material, the form, the treatment."

"Life teaches the storyteller his themes and subject matter; literature teaches him how to get a handle on them: what has been done already, what might be done differently, whats a story anyway, and what is to be found in the existing inventory of situations, attitudes, characters, tonalities, forms, and effects accumulated over four thousand years of written literature."

"The Tragic View of liberal education is that even at its best, … it is so necessarily, unavoidably limited that all it can attempt is to afford us some experience of, for example, informed close reading and critical thinking, and to make us aware that there remain continents of knowledge out there that one lifetime could scarcely scratch the surface of, even were we to devote it all to reading and studying — which we must not, since education comes so much from hands-on doing and experiencing as well as from reading and study."

"[N]othing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it, from outside, by people."