Quotes About Canon

“Fiction writers are fully ten times more likely to be bipolar than the general population, and poets are an amazing forty times more likely to struggle with the disorder. Based on statistics like these, psychologist Daniel Nettle writes, "It is hard to avoid the conclusion that most of the canon of Western culture was produced by people with a touch of madness." Essayist Brooke Allen does Nettle one better: "The Western literary tradition, it seems, has been dominated by a sorry collection of alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, manic-depressives, sexual predators, and various unfortunate combinations of two, three, or even all of the above.”

— Jonathan Gottschall

“Canon gives orders that no more prayers are to be offered up for the British government.”

— Charles Kaiser

“Life in Japan, nowadays, is nothing like a Kurosawa movie, and only the contemptible Weeaboo thinks that it is. In order to be a whole, well-rounded Otaku, you need to be up on Japanese popular culture, as much as you may be up on anime, samurai philosophy or the canon of Square Enix games.”

— Alexei Maxim Russell

“A canon is a guarded catalogue of that speech, music and art which houses inside us, which is irrevocably familiar to our homecomings. And this will include, if honestly arrived at and declared (even if solely to oneself), all manner of ephemera, trivial, and possibly mendacious matter ... No manor woman need justify his personal anthology, his canonic welcomes. Love does not argue its necessities.”

— George Steiner

“Any content that functions through its emotional dynamisms, such as the paralyzing grip of inertia or an invasion by instinct, belongs to the sphere of the mother, to nature. But all contents capable of conscious realization, a value, an idea, a moral canon, or some other spiritual force, are related to the father-, never to the mother-system.”

— Erich Neumann

“We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world-indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states-the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities.”

— Peter Sloterdijk

“Many [Tudor-era religious radicals] believed then, exactly as Christian fundamentalists do today, that they lived in the 'last days' before Armageddon and, again just as now, saw signs all around in the world that they took as certain proof that the Apocalypse was imminent. Again like fundamentalists today, they looked on the prospect of the violent destruction of mankind without turning a hair. The remarkable similarity between the first Tudor Puritans and the fanatics among today's Christian fundamentalists extends to their selective reading of the Bible, their emphasis on the Book of Revelation, their certainty of their rightness, even to their phraseology. Where the Book of Revelation is concerned, I share the view of Guy, that the early church fathers released something very dangerous on the world when, after much deliberation, they decided to include it in the Christian canon.
[From the author's concluding Historical Note]”

— C.J. Sansom

“If this is true, then neither the past nor the present is normative. It is the canon of Scripture that renders both relative and open to correction.”

— Michael S. Horton

“As for my faith: I've become my father's son-that is, I've become the kind of believer that Pastor Merrill used to be. Doubt one minute, faith the next-sometimes inspired, sometimes in despair. Canon Campbell taught me to ask myself a question when the latter state settles upon me. Whom do I know who's alive whom I love? Good question-one that can bring you back to life. These days, I love Dan Needham and the Rev. Katherine Keeling; I know I love them because I worry about them-Dan should lose some weight, Katherine should gain some! What I feel for Hester isn't exactly love; I admire her-she's certainly been a more heroic survivor than I've been, and her kind of survival is admirable. And then there are those distant, family ties that pass for love-I'm talking about Noah and Simon, about Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred. I look forward to seeing them every Christmas.”

— John Irving

“After the war, prompted by the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, I entered Parliament so that a priest could speak out for the poor, as canon law at that time still permitted.”

— Abbe Pierre

“The greatest block today in the way of woman's emancipation is the church, the canon law, the Bible and the priesthood.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“I don't really have a favorite camera. I use a Leica and Canon a lot. It depends, especially professionally, on the requirements. But my carry-around camera is a Leica.”

— Elliott Erwitt

“The truth is, I can't help the way people perceive anything, from the role of financial industry in the economic crisis, to the place of women's fiction in the canon of modern literature, to the rank of mint chocolate chip ice cream as a favorite Baskin-Robbins flavor.”

— Erin Duffy

“Canon is basically a very aggressive company. Our company works on competitive principles. It does not treat people equally, but it does treat them fairly.”

— Fujio Mitarai

“The support of organizations including the NY Jets, Canon USA, USA Football, and Outback Steakhouse is a great example of how corporate America can make an impact in bettering the communities where employees work and live.”

— Boomer Esiason

“As both a local resident and a parent with a CF-afflicted child, I'm thankful for companies like Canon, Chase and Outback who believe that giving back to the community is critical to their role as corporate citizens.”

— Boomer Esiason

“'Midnight's Children' falls under the genre of post-colonial writing, and there is a range of writers like V.S. Naipaul and Salman who popularised it. 'Midnight's Children' was incredibly important in this canon.”

— Satya Bhabha

“'Catholic writer' seems like you have an agenda of evangelization, as if you were somehow influenced in your choice of perspective by dogma or canon law. That has nothing to do with me. I don't have a lot in common with other 'Catholic' writers.”

— Mary Gordon

“A more sensitive man than Canon Prescott might have felt that he was de trop.”

— Agatha Christie

“Southern food has been riding a long wave of popularity that has elevated cooking in Southern cities. But it has also led to a formulaic culinary canon laden with house-cured pork products, bespoke grits and lots of food served in Mason jars. The cooks who defined the style were mostly men in tourist-heavy towns like Atlanta, Nashville and Charleston, S.C. Chefs who didn't cook like that risked losing business.”

— Anonymous.

“What I love is a good role. In the theatre, there is just a canon of extraordinary roles, the quality of character is amazing, but I also love working in front of a camera. It was the first one for me; as a kid I was in front of a camera. I feel at home.”

— Megan Follows

“Historically, the women who have been the great painters of the canon have very often have been the wives or daughters of supportive men. Like Artemisia, whose father was a very established painter. I will say that the two current contemporary artists I admire the most are women: Kara Walker and Swoon.”

— Molly Crabapple

“Gertrude Stein maintained that one wrote for oneself and for strangers, a superb recognition that I would extend into a parallel apothegm: one reads for oneself and for strangers. The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called "aesthetic dignity." One of the ineluctable stigmata of the canonical is aesthetic dignity, which is not to be hired.”

— Harold Bloom

“A canon is antithetical to everything the New York art world has been about for the past 40 years, during which we went from being the center of the art world to being one of many centers.”

— Jerry Saltz

“You can find things in the traditional religions which are very benign and decent and wonderful and so on, but I mean, the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon. The God of the Bible - not only did He order His chosen people to carry out literal genocide - I mean, wipe out every Amalekite to the last man, woman, child, and, you know, donkey and so on, because hundreds of years ago they got in your way when you were trying to cross the desert - not only did He do things like that, but, after all, the God of the Bible was ready to destroy every living creature on earth because some humans irritated Him. That's the story of Noah. I mean, that's beyond genocide - you don't know how to describe this creature. Somebody offended Him, and He was going to destroy every living being on earth? And then He was talked into allowing two of each species to stay alive - that's supposed to be gentle and wonderful.”

— Noam Chomsky

“Many of Judy Blume's books - which I devoured when I was growing up and where I found characters that were believable because they were a lot like me - caused considerable consternation when they were first published, but now they're widely accepted as an essential part of the children's literary canon.”

— Jeff Kinney

“Comics have a problem, and that is continuity - the obsession with placing the characters in an existing world, where every event is marked in canon. You're supposed to believe that these weepy star boys of now are the same gung-ho super teens fighting space monsters in the '60s, and they've only aged perhaps five years.”

— John Hodgman

“Regardless of the medium, be it television or feature or documentary, I'm not gonna distinguish and worry about my particular canon, whatever that means.”

— Joe Carnahan

“I'm a classic Church of England member, but part of its strength is the fact that it doesn't ask us to sign up to too much of a canon ... but I've always found the teachings of Jesus and the Bible quite useful as a sort of handy guide.”

— David Cameron

“I own a Canon 20D, though I don't remember the last time I used it. Ever since the iPhone 4, I've been completely absorbed in taking photos from my mobile phone.”

— Kevin Systrom

“I got my interest in Lotte Lenya and the Brecht-Weill canon from my parents. And I love classical music - I got that from my parents. I love Cole Porter - that I got from my dad.”

— Marianne Faithfull

“Before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world and all of us against the infidel.”

— Leon Uris

“We could say that Romanian Onirisme was born from painting and not from surrealist literature. The visual is primordial. Dimov said, 'Dreams are not a source, but a canon, a legislative model.'”

— Dumitru Tepeneag

“My fan fiction is canon.”

— Dwayne McDuffie

“They who say that women do not desire the right of suffrage, that they prefer masculine domination to self-government, falsify every page of history, every fact in human experience. It has taken the whole power of the civil and canon law to hold woman in the subordinate position which it is said she willingly accepts.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“The Canon AE1 - a fully manual camera. [My mother] had a 50mm, which is a standard lens, and then I got a 28mm. Then I started a little punk magazine, a zine, when I was 14 or 15 years old. I was shooting my friends skateboarding and it was the beginning of the Macintosh. We wouldn't do layouts on the computer; we would pick the font and then type up a paragraph and then print it out and cut it up and put it in a little mock-up and Xerox it.”

— Jeff Vespa

“One thing must be emphatically stated. The New Testament books did not become authoritative for the Church because they were formally included in a canonical list; on the contrary, the Church included them in her canon because she already regarded them as divinely inspired, recognizing their innate worth and generally apostolic authority, direct or indirect.”

— F. F. Bruce

“We all exist in similar systems that mirror and reproduce the same American culture for the most part. What Oscar Wilde said about the lucky author who has a non-literary day job no longer holds, if it ever did. Artists seek validation as much as they seek money. The creation and invention of culture and canon is where most of the trouble lies.”

— Fady Joudah

“I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccessible or absent; that a poetic structure - like the canon, which is only a hole surrounded by steel - can be based only on what one does not have; and that ultimately one can write only to fill a void or at the least to situate, in relation to the most lucid part of ourselves, the place where this incommensurable abyss yawns within us.”

— Michel Leiris

“Weddings in our society seem designed to reduce the bride and groom to precisely the condition of those who, because they 'lack sufficient use of reason,' are 'incapable of contracting marriage,' according to canon law.”

— Nancy Mairs

“Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.”

— William Kennedy

“It struck me recently, that one should really consider the sequence of a protein molecule about to fold into a precise geometric form as a line of melody written in a canon form & so designed by Nature to fold back into itself, creating harmonic chords of interaction consistent with biological function”

— Christian B. Anfinsen

“My husband and I have watched a lot of Hitchcock movies in bulk, and there's a lot to be gained from that, from focusing strictly on an artists canon.”

— Claire Danes

“When you're walking in, basically like a kid a candy store, to a project where there's an endless canon of material, you have to step back from it as a self-indulgence. You have to look at it neutrally.”

— Josh Groban

“I could name many women who travel or who work with America as a theme. I think it was more not being able to name canonical women, whose work is part of the American canon.”

— Cynthia Daignault

“I am for liberty of conscience in its noblest, broadest, and highest sense. But I cannot give liberty of conscience to the pope and his followers, the papists, so long as they tell me, through all their councils, theologians, and canon laws that their conscience orders them to burn my wife, strangle my children, and cut my throat when they find their opportunity.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“These teachings in regard to woman so faithfully reflect the provisions of the canon law that it is fair to infer that their inspiration came from the same source, written by men, translated by men, revised by men. If the Bible is to be placed in the hands of our children, read in our schools, taught in our theological seminaries, proclaimed as God's law in our temples of worship, let us by all means call a council of women in New York, and give it one more revision from the woman's standpoint.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“What makes a difference is when we take our mind and put it into the scriptures, when we read the Buddhist Canon, the Pali Canon, when we read the Tibetan books, when we read anything inspiring - somebody else's journey into the world of enlightenment.”

— Frederick Lenz

“If you know that everything comes from the mind, don't become attached. Once attached, you're unaware. But once you see your own nature, the entire Canon becomes so much prose. It's thousands of sutras and shastras only amount to a clear mind. Understanding comes in midsentence. What good are doctrines? The ultimate Truth is beyond words. Doctrines are words. They're not the Way. The Way is wordless. Words are illusions ... Don't cling to appearances, and you'll break through all barriers ...”

— Bodhidharma

“Self-love is the most inhibited sin in the canon.”

— William Shakespeare