Pardon Literary Quotes

Chase looked like a drowning man without a life preserver, and by the look in his eyes, he was going under for the third time. “I knew you would be like the waters of the South Pacific Ocean.” “I beg your pardon?” “I liken people to different bodies of water,” he quickly explained. “You what?” “Each ocean has a different personality,” he said to clarify. “The Pacific Ocean is warmer and inviting, but the color is muddied in places. The Arctic Ocean is cold and very uninviting, one might even say that it is not very appealing, but it’s full of life. Then there is the South Pacific Ocean, warm, inviting, and crystal clear. It has this purity to it. Why, the coloring of the water is some of the brightest blue I’ve ever seen in my entire life. There are even places that you can see thirty meters down.

I am by profession an agent and no writer, so you will have to pardon any lack of literary flourish.

Just read The Virtue of Minding Your Own Business. Oh my, what currents run deep! Beautifully seen, beautifully told. Praise praise praise . . . Pardon my French, but you are one darn major American writer!" ---Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions, on Sandcastle and Other Stories

There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we’ll soon see. Let’s take, for example, an average reader, a cool-headed, mature, educated man leading a more or less healthy life. A man who buys books and literary magazines. So there you have him. This man can read things that are written for when you’re calm, but he can also read any other kind of book with a critical eye, dispassionately, without absurd or regrettable complicity. That’s how I see it. I hope I’m not offending anyone. Now let’s take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He’s the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther. Second: he’s a limited reader. Why limited? That’s easy: because he can only read the literature of desperation, or books for the desperate, which amounts to the same thing, the kind of person or freak who’s unable to read all the way through In Search of Lost Time, for example, or The Magic Mountain (a paradigm of calm, serene, complete literature, in my humble opinion), or for that matter, Les Misérables or War and Peace. Am I making myself clear? Good. So I talked to them, told them, warned them, alerted them to the dangers they were facing. It was like talking to a wall. Furthermore: desperate readers are like the California gold mines. Sooner or later they’re exhausted! Why? It’s obvious! One can’t live one’s whole life in desperation. In the end the body rebels, the pain becomes unbearable, lucidity gushes out in great cold spurts. The desperate reader (and especially the desperate poetry reader, who is insufferable, believe me) ends up by turning away from books. Inevitably he ends up becoming just plain desperate. Or he’s cured! And then, as part of the regenerative process, he returns slowly—as if wrapped in swaddling clothes, as if under a rain of dissolved sedatives—he returns, as I was saying, to a literature written for cool, serene readers, with their heads set firmly on their shoulders. This is what’s called (by me, if nobody else) the passage from adolescence to adulthood.

written a whole book based on his experiences as a Cuban American, including learning English as a second language. His position in academia and in the literary community was based entirely on this bogus vita. Now that the truth was out, people were torn. Many were outraged by what they saw as a betrayal of trust and an unforgivable act of cultural appropriation. Others believed that, wrong though it was, the deception might be pardoned in light of what a good teacher he was known to have been.