# John Barth - Quotes: 10 - Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-barth ## Books - [Final Fridays](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-barth/final-fridays.md) — 6 quotes - [The Sot-Weed Factor](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-barth/the-sot-weed-factor.md) — 4 quotes ## Recently added quotes > 'Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and o'erlook the motive, and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-barth/the-sot-weed-factor/tis-eer-the.md) > The Tragic View of liberal education is that even at its best, … it is so necessarily, unavoidably limited that all it can attempt is to afford us some experience of, for example, informed close reading and critical thinking, and to make us aware that there remain continents of knowledge out there that one lifetime could scarcely scratch the surface of, even were we to devote it all to reading and studying — which we must not, since education comes so much from hands-on doing and experiencing as well as from reading and study. p. 189 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-barth/final-fridays/the-tragic-view.md) > So what's to be said … for a curriculum devoted to a study of a more-or-less-agreed-upon roster of "the best that has been thought and said," in Matthew Arnold's famous formulation — or at least as representatively much of that Best as the ever-evolving consensus of a good college faculty believes can be fruitfully addressed between undergraduate matriculation and the baccalaureate?Well: what's to be said for it, needless to say, is that it not only edifies and instructs — any good old curriculum does that — but permits discourse within a shared frame of reference richer and more stable than this season's pop music, films, and TV shows, which a colleague of mine used to lament were the only points of cultural reference that he could assume to be shared by his undergraduate students. p. 185 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-barth/final-fridays/so-whats-to-be-said.md) > [R]eading a splendid writer, or even just a very entertaining writer, is not a particularly passive business. An accomplished artist is giving us his or her best shots, in what she or he regards as their most effective sequence—of words, of actions, of foreshadowings and plot-twists and insights and carefully prepared dramatic moments. It's up to us to respond to those best shots with our minds and hearts and spirits and our accumulated experience of life and of art. p. 27 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-barth/final-fridays/r-eading-a-splendid.md) > 'Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-barth/the-sot-weed-factor/tis-eer-the-lot.md) > Is a man a salvage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile manners? Or is salvagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse? [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-barth/the-sot-weed-factor/is-a-man.md) > More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-barth/the-sot-weed-factor/more-historys-made.md) > [T]o a greater or lesser extent our knowledge even of close kin is often fragmentary, inferred like a fossil skeleton or an ancient vase from whatever always-limited experience and shards of memory we have of them. p. 297 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-barth/final-fridays/t-o-a-greater.md) > [B]y writing an Aenead that combines an Odyssey with an Iliad, Virgil gives the impression of wanting to outdo the Homer of whom he is the self-conscious heir and to whom his Latin epic is also a homage, just as Augustan Rome is at once the cultural heir and political master of classical Greece. You want to be a great epic poet? Here are your models. Virgil follows them—programmatically but not slavishly—and because he happens to be a great epic poet, his Aenead turns out to be not a monumental Case-1 imitation of the great model, but a great epic poem. Thirteen centuries later, Dante compounds the stunt, taking as his literal and figurative guide not "unselfconscious" Homer but self-conscious (and Homer-conscious) Virgil, and not only scripts himself into the wandering hero role but orchestrates his own welcome … into the company of the immortals—in a Limbo, moreover, where they must ineluctably remain, but from which he will proceed through Purgatory to Paradise. Talk about chutzpah! Happening to be a great poet, Dante brings the thing off. p. 54 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-barth/final-fridays/b-y-writing-an-aenead.md) > As instanced by Virgil and Dante, the vocation of artisthood bears some analogy to those of mythic-herohood and messiahship—conspicuously so for the Romantics and the great early Modernists, with their characteristic conception of the artist as hero (one recalls James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, originally named Stephen Hero, vowing to "forge, in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race"), more modestly so even for Postmoderns. In at least some cases, the present author's included, one's apprentice sense of calling may be far from clear. even to oneself. … One may be uncertain of both one's vocation and one's talent for it, or confident of one of those but not the other, or confident of both but mistaken, or doubtful of both but mistaken, or correct on one or both counts. In the happiest case, one comes to have reasonable faith in both calling and gift and at least some "objective" confirmation that that faith is not altogether misplaced. But "real, non-scripted life" is slippery terrain, in which templates and prophecies are ill-defined, elastic, arguable, and verdicts are forever subject to reversal. One crosses one's fingers, invokes one's muse and does one's best. p. 306 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-barth/final-fridays/as-instanced-by-virgil.md)