Quotes by Critics - Page 11

What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
George Orwell
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
George Orwell
Men and women who are lonely create. Those who are gregarious rarely do... Any poet would rather bed with a girl than write a poem about her. All art is the result of frustration. Art is energy deflected from its normal course in action.
Burton Rascoe
I carefully lifted out of the pose and spoke up: "Uh, Fran? When I'm doing the pose (camel), I have this feeling in my chest, kind of a scary, tight feeling."Fran was adjusting someone across the room. She had a way of looking like a thoughtful seamstress when she made adjustments: an inch let out here, a seam straightened there, and everything would be just right. She might as well have had pins tucked between her lips and a tape measure around her neck. Without missing a beat or looking up she said, "Oh, that's fear. Try the pose again."Fear. I hadn't even known it was there.
Claire Dederer
The fusty showman fumbles, must Fit in a particle of dustThe universe, for fear it gainIts freedom from my cube of brain.Yet dust bears seeds that grow to graceBehind my crude-striped wooden faceAs I, a puppet tinsel-pinkLeap on my springs, learn how to think—Till like the trembling golden stalkOf some long-petalled star, I walkThrough the dark heavens, and the dewFalls on my eyes and sense thrills through.
Edith Sitwell
And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre.
George Orwell
No two persons ever read the same book.
Edmund Wilson
For when I trace back the years I have liv'd, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer'd Work Of Nature my life has been. If I were now to inscribe my own History with its unparalleled Sufferings and surprizing Adventures (as the Booksellers might indite it), I know that the great Part of the World would not believe the Passages there related, by reason of the Strangeness of them, but I cannot help their Unbelief; and if the Reader considers them to be but dark Conceits, then let him bethink himself that Humane life is quite out of the Light and that we are all Creatures of Darknesse.
Peter Ackroyd
A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.
George Bernard Shaw
Statements of fact are after all statements, which presumes a number of questionable judgements: that those statements are worth making, perhaps more worth making than certain others, that I am the sort of person entitled to make them and perhaps able to guarantee their truth, that you are the kind of person worth making them to, that something useful is accomplished by making them, and so on.
Terry Eagleton
Opera in English is in the main just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
H.L. Mencken
The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weather is that which is woven of conviction.
James Russell Lowell
Our real duty is always found running in the direction of our worthiest desires.
Randolph Bourne
Nations, like men, are wary of truth, for truth is too often not beautiful.
Addison Gayle Jr.
Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
George Bernard Shaw
Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good.
George Bernard Shaw
What do you want? What do you know about it? What are you talking about? Everything belongs to Him, just as I do. But I, I love Him. I worship Him, I serve Him. Do you think you can oppose Him, poor creatures like you? He's all-powerful. He's above all of you. Everything we have comes from Him. Everything that lives or grows comes from Him.
Felix Salten
It was not by gentle sweetness and self-abnegation that order was brought out of chaos; it was by strict method, by stern discipline, by rigid attention to detail, by ceaseless labor, by the fixed determination of an indomitable will.
Lytton Strachey
Those who write ill, and they who ne'er durst write,Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.
John Dryden
We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us.
William H. Gass
Those eyes had seen people weep, and had cared, and had hurt them again anyway. It’s a look that no human eyes should ever have.
Orson Scott Card
I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose.
Sven Birkerts
I have lived long enough to be battered by the realities of life and not too long to be downed by them.
John Mason Brown
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
George Orwell
For if in careless summer daysIn groves of Ashtaroth we whored,Repentant now, when winds blow cold,We kneel before our rightful lord;The lord of all, the money-god,Who rules us blood and hand and brain,Who gives the roof that stops the wind,And, giving, takes away again;Who spies with jealous, watchful care,Our thoughts, our dreams, our secret ways,Who picks our words and cuts our clothes,And maps the pattern of our days;Who chills our anger, curbs our hope,And buys our lives and pays with toys,Who claims as tribute broken faith,Accepted insults, muted joys;Who binds with chains the poet’s wit,The navvy’s strength, the soldier’s pride,And lays the sleek, estranging shieldBetween the lover and his bride.
George Orwell
There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.", Summer 1956]
Dorothy Parker
Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are a subject to a good many different ailments, but I have never heard of one who has suffered from insomnia.
Joseph Wood Krutch
In a flash I saw the truth; that my love for this spot is built up of numberless trivialities, of small memories all incommunicable, or ridiculous when communicated...
Quiller -Couch
Like capitalism,” Carl suggested. “‘We’ll give you so much pleasure, you’ll never want to try another socioeconomic system.
Caleb Crain
In such a regime, I say you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murdered in the chest - without asking to be paid.
Chinua Achebe
I always like to be in the presence of people who are good at and love their jobs, Irrespective of their jobs.
Geoff Dyer
[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades ... Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet
George Orwell
We can easily become as much slaves to precaution as we can to fear.
Randolph Bourne
If I had a shiny gun I could have a world of fun Speeding bullets through the brains Of the folks that cause me pains :)
Dorothy Parker
On the big bed, Mamima and Sandeep’s mother began to dream, sprawled in vivid crab-like postures. His aunt lay on her stomach, her arms bent as if she were swimming to the edge of a lake; his mother lay on her back, her feet (one of which had a scar on it) arranged in the joyous pose of a dancer.
Amit Chaudhuri
A few years ago, a taxi driver told me about a club & a dog. A waiter spoke to me about ladders today. Life is full of lessons for those who listen.
Indeewara Jayawardane
If our friends' idealizations of us need the corrective of our own experience it may be true also that our own sordid view of our lives needs the corrective of our friends' idealizations.
Oscar W. Firkins
But the toaster was quite satisfied with itself, thank you. Though it knew from magazines that there were toasters who could toast four slices at a time, it didn't think that the master, who lived alone and seemed to have few friends, would have wanted a toaster of such institutional proportions. With toast, it's quality that matters, not quantity.
Thomas M. Disch
There is no exercise better for the heart than reaching down and lifting people up.
John Holmes
One thing—one thing exceeds the eternity of the star, he cries, and that is the dark which surrounds it.
William H. Gass
Present joys are more to flesh and blood Than the dull prospect of a distant good.
John Dryden
They sicken of the calm that know the storm.
Dorothy Parker
The best client is a scared millionaire.
H.L. Mencken
He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts.
Henry James
To repel one's cross is to make it heavier.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The sensitive person's hostility to the machine is in one sense unrealistic, because of the obvious fact that the machine has come to stay. But as an attitude of mind there is a great deal to be said for it. The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug - that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes.
George Orwell
Only man clogs his happiness with care destroying what is with thoughts of what may be.
John Dryden
It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of ... it's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really mess up your life.[Author Hilary Mantel on being asked about being a writer with endometriosis, Nov 2012 NPR interview]
Hilary Mantel
Damned Neuters in their Middle way of Steering Are neither Fish nor Flesh nor good Red Herring.
John Dryden
I'd like to look below my eyes and see not language staring back at me, not sentences or single words or awkward pen lines, but a surface clear and burnished as glass.
William H. Gass
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.
George Orwell
Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.
George Orwell
Colonel Graff: We won! That's all that matters.Ender Wiggin: No. The way we win matters.
Orson Scott Card
Well, then, he ought to write her a letter. He ought to say: 'This is to tell you that I propose to live with you as soon as this show is over. You will be prepared immediately on cessation of active hostilities to put yourself at my disposal; please. Signed, Xtopher Tietjens, Acting O.C. 9th Glams. A proper military communication.
Ford Madox Ford
In the future we would have total storage, all of us would, our media libraries would dematerialise and just float above us, books would no longer sit on the shelves reminding us that we had not read them, music and TV and film formats would no longer clutter the den reminding us of all we had not yet listened to or watched.
Joshua Cohen
When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth
Chinua Achebe
Gutenberg (hesitantly): Perhaps the book, like God, is an idea some men will cling to. The revolution of print pursued a natural course. Like a river, print flowed to its readers, and the cheapness of the means permitted it, where the channel was narrow, to trickle. This electronic flood you describe has no banks; it massively delivers but what to whom? There is something intrinsically small about its content, compared to the genius of its working. And--if I may point out a technical problem--its product never achieves autonomy from its means of delivery. A book can lie unread for a century, and all it needs to come to life is to be scanned by a literate brain.
John Updike
Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
H.L. Mencken
Without art the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw
Whatever we conceive well we express clearly.
Nicolas Boileau