"Short stories are placed “at that exquisite point where poetry ends and reality begins.” their characters, as James again said, must be “so strangely, fascinatingly particular and yet so recognizably general.”"
"In major short stories, reality becomes fantastic and phantasmagoria becomes disconcerting mundane."
"We want them for different needs; if the first gratifies our hunger of reality , the second reaches us how ravenous we still are for what is beyond supposed reality."
"There is always less urgency in our meditations upon Hamlet than upon God, and yet I am tempted to remark of Hamlet what the ancient Gnostics affirmed about Jesus: first he resurrected, and then he died."
"Melville was not a Christian, and tended to identify with the ancient Gnostic heresy, in which the creator God of this world is a bungler and impostor, while the true God, called the Stranger or Alien God, is exiled somewhere in the outer regions of the cosmos. Early, major Faulkner is a kind of unk"