“Shakespeare brings us to know ourselves. Dante, with his dissection of all others, bids us to know one another.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“He was outwardly calm but inwardly bleeding to death.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“Though a woman tempted man to eat, my dear Longfellow," said Holmes, "you never hear of Eve having to do with his drinking, for he took to that of his own notion.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“I prefer the society of one faithful person to an association of rapid talkers, who more than anything else seek admiration from one another.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“ 'Yes, we rather condemn people for eternity without the courtesy of informing them.' ”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“Why did nature not ask my advice about my features?”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“There was still the temptation to believe the world was a mere trap for human sin. But sin, the way he saw it, was only the failure of an imperfectly made being to keep a perfect law.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“Dante's Hell is part of our world as much as part of the underworld, and shouldn't be avoided, Lowell said, but rather confronted. We sound the depths of Hell very often in this life.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“ 'Do not ask what brings Dante to man but what brings man to Dante-to personally enter his sphere, though it is forever severe and unforgiving.' ”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“On the trees were no longer only leaves but brown fruits, on the bushes no longer blossoms but clusters of red berries. And the wind had a rough manliness in its voice - the tone not of a lover but of a husband.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“ 'Till America has learned to love literature not as an amusement, not as a mere doggerel to memorize in a college room, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy, my dear reverend president, she will not have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a people. That which raises it from a dead name to a living power.' ”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“Sepa que cuando soy amigo de un hombre lo soy para siempre, y es muy difícil hacerme volver atrás. Y aunque un hombre pueda gozar siendo mi enemigo, no puede convertirme a mí en el suyo mientras yo no quiera. Buenas tardes.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“ 'Pity without rigor would be cowardly egotism, mere sentimentality.' ”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“These people build as if they were immortal and eat as if they were to die instantly.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“You have never fought for anything in your life. You write poems and articles about slavery and the murder of Indians and hope something will change. You fight what does not come near your door, professors. You've inherited everything in your lives and do not know what it is to cry for your bread! Well, with what other expectations did I come to this country? What should I complain of? The greatest bard had no home but exile. One day to come, perhaps, I shall walk on my own shores again, one more with true friends, before I leave this earth.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“Remember that only when past genius is transmitted into a present power shall we meet the first truly american poet. And somewhere, born to the streets rather than the athenaeum, we will come upon the first true reader. The spirit of the american is suspected to be timid, imitative, tame -- the scholar decent, indolent, complaisant. The mind of our country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. Without action, the scholar is not yet man. Ideas must work through the bones and arms of good men or they are no better than dreams.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“The force of Dante's poetry resonated most in those who did not confess the Catholic faith, for believers would inevitably have quibbles with Dante's theology. But for those most distant theologically, Dante's faith was so perfect, so unyielding, that a reader found himself compelled by the poetry to take it all to heart.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“Survival here means simply an incomplete death, not a partial life -- to be trapped in a gap between the living and the dead. If I had a thousand tongues, I would not try to describe the agony!”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“believes the world is against him. Nothing”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“Till America has learned to love literature not as an amusement, not as mere doggerel to memorize in a college room, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy, my dear reverend president, she will not have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a people. That which raises it from a dead name to a living power.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“When you ask one friend to dine, give him your best wine. When you ask two, the second best will do.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“Now, on his way to another lecture, the very thought of entering a room full of students, who still thought it was possible to learn all about something, made him yawn.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“A man was leaning idly against an elm. ... The man, who towered over the poet even at his slanting angle, too old for a student and too worn for a faculty member, stared at him with the familiar, insatiable gleam of the literary admirer.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“Longfellow smiled. "A great part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, my dear Lowell, but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“...It is the one time Dante calls such explicit attention to the idea of contrapasso-a word for which we have no exact translation, no precise definition in English, because the word in itself is its definition... Well, my dear Longfellow, I would say countersuffering ... the notion that each sinner must be punished by continuing the damage of his own sin against him... just as these Schismatics are cut apart...”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“We never like the smell of our own vices in other people, Holmes. Ah, let's steer here for a drink or two," Lowell suggested.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“Milton was the gold standard of religious poets for English and American scholars. But Milton wrote of Hell and Heaven from above and below, respectively, not from the inside: safer advantages.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“No, never mind, I didn't think so. Mead, Dante's theme is man-not a man.' Lowell said finally with a mild patience that he reserved only for students. "The Italians forever twitch at Dante's sleeves trying to make him say he is of their politics and their way of thinking. Their way indeed! To confine it to Florence or Italy is to banish it from the sympathies of mankind. We read Paradise Lost as a poem but Dante's Comedy as a chronicle of our inner lives. Do you boys know of Isaiah 38:10”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“Dante is the first Christian poet, the first one whose whole system of thought is colored by a pure Christian theology. But the poem comes nearer to us than this. It is there real history of a brother man, of a tempted, purified, and at last triumphant human soul; it teaches the benign ministry of sorrow. His is the first keel that ever ventured into the silent sea of human consciousness to find a new world of poetry. He held heartbreak at bay for twenty years, and would not let himself die until he had done his task. Neither shall Longfellow. Neither shall I."
Lowell turned and started to descend.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
“Believe that when I am at once a man's friend I am always so-nor is it so very hard to bring me to it. And though a man may enjoy himself in being my enemy, he cannot make me HIS for longer than I wish. Good afternoon." Lowell had a way of leaving a conversation with the other person needing more from him.”
― Matthew Pearl, quote from The Dante Club
Matthew Pearl
Born place: Boston, The United States
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“The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell.”
― Arthur Miller, quote from Death of a Salesman
“You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.”
― Ernest Cline, quote from Ready Player One
“Fucking was how babies were made.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Breakfast of Champions
“I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened.”
― Emma Donoghue, quote from Room
“Dear me! how long is art!
And short is our life!
I often know amid the scholar's strife
A sinking feeling in my mind and heart.
How difficult the means are to be found
By which the primal sources may be breached;
And long before the halfway point is reached,
They bury a poor devil in the ground.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Faust: First Part
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