8 Quotes & Sayings By A Bartlett Giamatti

A. Bartlett Giamatti is the author of numerous books, including The Great American Novel (1971); The Origins of the French Symbolist Movement (1992); The American Essay (1994); The Lost World of Classical Mythology (2001). He has received numerous awards for his writing, including the Pulitzer Prize for biography. A professor emeritus at Yale University, he was president of PEN American Center in 1997-98 and is currently a member of the board of trustees for the Society of Authors, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Humanities Center Read more

He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

1
Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things — and going home is where that restoration occurs because that is where it matters most. A. Bartlett Giamatti
2
Sports represent a shared vision of how we continue, as individual, team, or community, to experience a happiness or absence of care so intense, so rare, and so fleeting that we associate their experience with experience otherwise described as religious or we say the sports experience must be the tattered remnant of an experience which was once described, when first felt, as religious. A. Bartlett Giamatti
3
If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination — through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction. A. Bartlett Giamatti
4
The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been essentially absent. I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing. I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of eachother and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know. A. Bartlett Giamatti
5
Teachers believe they have a gift for giving it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building. A. Bartlett Giamatti
6
A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching. A. Bartlett Giamatti
7
There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind. A. Bartlett Giamatti