A Quote by Zadie Smith

What interests me in [Lincoln in the Bardo] is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half.

Zadie Smith

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Argument Balance Between Could Exist Grotesque Half Interests Landed Like Like You Lincoln Me Only Other Other Half Perverse Slight Sublime Without

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Zadie Smith
British - Novelist
Born: October 25, 1975

Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.

Zadie Smith

I keep thinking of Robert Stone making the distinction between the word sublime and the word beautiful. He described being in a battle as sublime. Because even though people were dying, it was such a huge sensory experience that it became sublime.

George Saunders

There's one thing that I like about Rome that was stated by Napoleon: that from sublime to pathetic is only one step away. And in Rome there's a constant shifting between sublime and pathetic.

Paolo Sorrentino

Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.

Victor Hugo

I listen to a lot of Sublime. Dude, I'm obsessed with Sublime. You have no idea.

Behati Prinsloo

Anything which elevates the mind is sublime. Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty, are all sublime.

John Ruskin

A sublime soul can rise to all kinds of greatness, but by an effort; it can tear itself from all bondage, to all that limits and constrains it, but only by strength of will. Consequently the sublime soul is only free by broken efforts.

Friedrich Schiller

There's only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, but there's no road leading from the ridiculous to the sublime.

Lion Feuchtwanger

The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.

Thomas Paine

Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt

Immanuel Kant

Of all tools, an observatory is the most sublime. . . . What is so good in a college as an observatory? The sublime attaches to the door and to the first stair you ascent, that this is the road to the stars.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In all my work there's this notion of the melancholic. You can make a photograph about the sublime, but you can't make the sublime itself.

John Divola

A sublime religion inevitably generates a strong feeling of guilt. There is an unavoidable contrast between loftiness of profession and imperfection of practice. And, as one would expect, the feeling of guilt promotes hate and brazenness. Thus it seems that the more sublime the faith the more virulent the hatred it breeds.

Eric Hoffer

Neither man nor nation can exist without a sublime idea.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.

Victor Hugo

Welcome, Disappointment! Thy hand is cold and hard, but it is the hand of a friend. Thy voice is stern and harsh, but it is the voice of a friend. Oh, there is something sublime in calm endurance, something sublime in the resolute, fixed purpose of suffering without complaining, which makes disappointment oftentimes better than success!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A Quote by Zadie Smith

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