My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him ..

The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time..

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is pr….

We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres..

It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a ….

Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult..

Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total….

Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep..

Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at inf….

No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the art….

The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology..

The entire Bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and ….

Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions..

The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death..

Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at..

Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at….

It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and were we have to surrender precision for flexibility..

The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams..

We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them..

The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf….

The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I believe in God, ….