What is art is not likely to be decided for decades or longer after the work has been producedöand then is often redecidedöso we must not think badly if we regard literature as entertainment rather than as transcendent enlightenment.

-Condon, Richard
  Comment in D L Fitzpatrick (ed) Contemporary Novelists.

Moderate sorrow Fits vulgar love, and for a vulgar man: But I have lov'd with such transcendent passion, I soar'd, at first, quite out of reason's view, And now am lost above it.

-Dryden,John
  All for Love, or The World Well Lost, act 2.

If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough.

-Ford, Richard
  The Sportswriter, ch.1.