September 2016.
The Dante Club
by Matthew Pearl
(New York: Random House, 2004)
It was a matter of principle for the Harvard fellows that they knew nothing of the living languages.
Page 30.
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 … she will not have succeed 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.
Page 31.
Pity without rigor would be cowardly egotism, mere sentimentality.
Page32.
The proof of poetry was … that it reduced to the essence of a single line the vague philosophy that floated in all men’s minds.
Page 34.
The very thought of entering a room full of students who thought it was possible to learn all about something made him yawn.
Page 34.
Why must mistakes only be made up for afterwards? Can’t they sometimes be mended by what came before?
Page 50.
I think we need no other hell than what we have just come out of.
Page 62.
We read Paradise Lost as a poem but Dante’s Comedy as a chronicle of our inner lives.
Page 67.
The poem’s great and lasting value is as the autobiography of a human soul
Pages 67-68.
“We must work to understand our foreigners, Dr. Holmes. If we do not conform newcomers to our national character and bring them in willing subjection to our institutions, the multitudes of outside people will one day conform us.”
Page 73.
Do not ask what brings Dante to man but what b rings man to Dante - to personally enter his sphere, though it is forever severe and unforgiving.
Page 74.
Only the narrow could be truly brave.
Page 115.
Only through genius is genius truly known.
Page 183.
Nature will tell the truth all the better for its not being put to death.
Page 200.
Sin … was only the failure of an imperfectly made being to keep a perfect law.
Page 208.
Shakespeare bring sus to know ourselves. Dante, with his dissection of all others, bids us know one another.
Page 227.
Dante wrote to remove us from times when death was incomprehensible. He wrote to give us hope for life … when we have none left, to know that our lives, our prayers, make a difference to God.
Page 228.
Nothing that keeps thought out will ever be safe from thought!
Page 232.
Who will be kind to him if I am not?
Page 237.
When you are in love you hear townspeople praising the one you praise.
Page 239.
How roundly defective was the design of humankind.
Page 249.
Dante was the first poet who ever thought to make a poem wholly out of the fabric of himself.
Page 251.
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
Page 280.
It is the sin that defines their actions which determines their fate in Hell.
Page 320.
Writing is not survival of he fittest but survival of the survivors.
Page 365.
Part of what’s gripping as out violence in narrative is that it often harbors secrets.
Page 376.
There’s a remarkable power about reading together, reading collectively, that’s brought out by reading groups.
Page 378.