Quote du Jour: Art for Our Sake

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As quoted in Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South:

Amidst such a terribly dehumanized world as ours, the function of art, says [critic Lionel] Trilling, is to rehumanize us. What we least need, says Trilling, is the anonymous and silenced voice of many modern novelists. …Hence Trilling’s call for novelists whose voice is not banished from their books: “Surely what we need is…the opportunity to identify ourselves with a mind that willingly admits that it is a mind and does not pretend that it is History or Events or the World but only a mind thinking and planning – possibly planning our escape.”
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