Frank Kermode Quotes & Sayings

It is one of the great charms of books that they have to end. — Frank Kermode

I suppose it would be better if one were aggressive, contentious and so on. But there's rarely any occasion to be savage. — Frank Kermode

The history of interpretation, the skills by which we keep alive in our minds the light and dark of past literature and past humanity ... is to an incalculable extent a history of error. — Frank Kermode

It is ourselves we encounter whenever we invent fictions. — Frank Kermode

It is not expected of critics that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives. — Frank Kermode

The first phase of modernism, which so far as the English language goes we associate with Pound and Yeats, Wyndham Lewis and Eliot and Joyce, was clerkly enough, sceptical in many ways; and yet we can without difficulty convict most of these authors of dangerous lapses into mythical thinking. All were men of critical temper, haters of the decadence of the times and the myths of mauvaise foi. All, in different ways, venerated tradition and had programmes which were at once modern and anti-schismatic. This critical temper was admittedly made to seem consistent with a strong feeling for renovation; the mood was eschatological, but scepticism and a refined traditionalism held in check what threatened to be a bad case of literary primitivism. It was elsewhere that the myths ran riot. — Frank Kermode

The books which seal off the long perspectives, which sever us from our losses, which represent the world of potency as a world of act, these are the books which, when the drug wears off, go on to the dump with the other empty bottles. Those that continue to interest us move through time to an end, an end we must sense even if we cannot know it; they live in change, until, which is never, as and is are one. — Frank Kermode