It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. – Robert Louis Stevenson, “Crabbed Age and Youth,” Virginibus Puerisque, 1881
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility. – Susan Sontag
