The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion. – Walter Benjamin
The book borrower…proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures…as by his failure to read these books. – Walter Benjamin
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. – Walter Benjamin
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collectors passion borders on the chaos of memories. – Walter Benjamin
Vision may sometimes sleep in the sun, while it wakens to widest revelation in utter darkness. Thus I am rapt in a trance-like acceptance of opening cavernous depths, crypts of decyphered gloom, yielding hollows of velvet obscurity that go down, down to the roots of things. – Virginia Garland, “The Rain,” Out West: A Magazine of the Old Pacific and the Ne