帕布莉卡“There’s an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enormous relief in that sense of how they were written to allow primary emotion, elemental emotion, to matter enormously but to give the thing an extraordinary flow so you don’t notice at what point that you’re actually overwhelmed by this. There’s no showiness, at all. It’s the opposite of showiness. I think, if it was a painting, it could be very grey abstract, almost, with some lines and very, very beautiful. But you wouldn’t have a notion of where the beauty was.
(Talking about the short stories of Alistair MacLeod, who he discovered while working on The Modern Library.)”
― Colm Tóibín, The Modern Library : The Two Hundred Best Novels in English Since 1950
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机器翻译，仅供参考：
“描述那个宇宙有着巨大的戏剧性的可能性。这些书，对我来说，是一个巨大的安慰，因为它们是如何写的，允许原始情感，基本情感，非常重要，但却给了这个东西一个特别的流动，这样你就不会注意到，你实际上是在什么时候被这些东西压倒了。一点也不华而不实。这与炫耀相反。我想，如果这是一幅画，它可能是非常抽象的灰色，几乎，有一些线条，非常非常美丽。但你根本不知道美在哪里。
（讲的是阿利斯泰尔·麦克劳德的短篇小说，他是在现代图书馆工作时发现的。）
―科尔姆·托伊宾，现代图书馆：1950年以来200部最佳英语小说
