Gary Saul Morson Quotes

United States, Critic
1948

Gary Saul Morson is an American literary critic and Slavist. He is particularly known for his scholarly work on the great Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Morson is Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. He was Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania for many years prior to leaving for Illinois.

Not everything that can be extracted appears in anthologies of quotations, in commonplace books, or on the back of Celestial Seasonings boxes. Only certain sorts of extracts become quotations.

Gary Saul Morson
I wonder if "an" ever occurs before "haughty" except in a quotation, or whether you can make anything sound like a quotation by adding a word like "goeth"?

Gary Saul Morson
- Word
- Occurs
- Quotation

A single gnomic line can come to resonate with centuries of subsequent wisdom.

Gary Saul Morson
- Wisdom
- Line
- Resonate
The attribution of a speaker is in fact a part of the quotation. Some statements simply are better if a certain famous person said them.

Gary Saul Morson
- Person
- Said
- Quotation
We sometimes think of quotations as extracts from larger texts, but some quotations originated complete unto themselves.

Gary Saul Morson
Reframing an extract as a quotation constitutes a kind of coauthorship. With no change in wording, the cited passage becomes different. I imagine that the thrill of making an anthology includes the opportunity to become such a coauthor.

Gary Saul Morson
An anthology of quotations is a museum of utterances.

Gary Saul Morson
Some lines are born quotations, some are made quotations, and some have "quotation" thrust upon them.

Gary Saul Morson
- Lines
- Quotations
- Thrust

People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy.

Gary Saul Morson
Unless created as freestanding works, quotations resemble "found" art. They are analogous, say, to a piece of driftwood identified as formally interesting enough to be displayed in an art museum or to a weapon moved from an anthropological to an artistic display.... The presenter of found art, whether material or verbal, has become a sort of artist. He has not made the object, but he has made it as art.

Gary Saul Morson
- Art
- Museum
- Quotations