Quotes by Critics - Page 12

It is always hazardous to express what one has to say indirectly and allusively.
Walter Pater
Like a turnip such a head could be blown away very easily. For where a man was weak, a woman has unmanned him. It would be a mercy to blow such a man away.
Joyce Carol Oates
Serving [Hamilton's] legacy didn't just mean commemorating him, though: It also meant continuing his work. [Eliza] crusaded against slavery, as Hamilton had. And this widow of an orphan helped to found the first private orphanage in New York. That's the real power of a legacy: We tell stories of people who are gone because like any powerful stories, they have the potential to inspire, and to change the world.
Jeremy McCarter
[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
George Bernard Shaw
I wanted to get away,' said she; 'everybody wants to plague and worry me about nothing. They'll be all right tomorrow. What's worrying them?''They are sacrificing to our Canadian God,' said Solly. 'We all believe that if we fret and abuse ourselves sufficiently, Providence will take pity and smile upon anything we attempt. A light heart, or a consciousness of desert, attracts ill luck. You have been away from your native land too long. You have forgotten our folkways. Listen to that gang over there; they are scanning the heavens and hoping aloud that it won't rain tomorrow. That is to placate the Mean Old Man in the Sky, and persuade him to be kind to us.
Robertson Davies
The MistakeWith the mistake your life goes in reverse.Now you can see exactly what you didWrong yesterday and wrong the day beforeAnd each mistake leads back to something worseAnd every nuance of your hypocrisyTowards yourself, and every excuseStands solidly on the perspective linesAnd there is perfect visibility.What an enlightenment. The colonnadeRolls past on either side. You needn't move.The statues of your errors brush your sleeve.You watch the tale turn back — and you're dismayed.And this dismay at this, this big mistakeIs made worse by the sight of all those whoKnew all along where these mistakes would lead — Those frozen friends who watched the crisis
James Fenton
At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.
George Bernard Shaw
I am old enough now to have all the memories of my people locked within my head. I remember things that happened long before I was born. I remember things that never happened at all. I live in memory. –Anton
Orson Scott Card
Our laws make law impossible our liberties destroy all freedom our property is organized robbery our morality an impudent hypocrisy our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes our power wielded by cowards and weaklings and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons.
George Bernard Shaw
[That wall] might be breached sometime in the future, but for now the only real conversation between them was the roots that had already grown low and deep, under the wall, where they could not be broken.The most terrible thing, though, was the fear that the wall could never be breached, that in his heart Alai was glad of the separation, and was ready to be Ender's enemy. For now that they could not be together, they must be infinitely apart, and what had been sure and unshakable was now fragile and insubstantial; from the moment we are not together, Alai is a stranger, for he has a life now that will be no part of mine, and that means that when I see him we will not know each other.
Orson Scott Card
The State that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
V.S. Pritchett
Beauty is single. Only ugliness is multiple, and even then its multiplicity is soon exhausted.
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love are the two greatest proofs not only of goodness of heart but of strength of mind.
William Hazlitt
What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.
Logan Pearsall Smith
I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worthwhile.
George Bernard Shaw
As has already been noted, fantastic literature developed at precisely the moment when genuine belief in the supernatural was on the wane, and when the sources provided by folklore could safely be used as literary material. It is almost a necessity, for the writer as well as for the reader of fantastic literature, that he or she should not believe in the literal truth of the beings and objects described, although the preferred mode of literary expression is a naive realism. Authors of fantastic literature are, with a few exceptions, not out to convert, but to set down a narrative story endowed with the consistency and conviction of inner reality only during the time of the reading: a game, sometimes a highly serious game, with anxiety and fright, horror and terror.
Franz Rottensteiner
But unfortunately you get no further by merely wishing class-distinctionsaway. More exactly, it is necessary to wish them away, but your wish has noefficacy unless you grasp what it involves. The fact that has got to be faced isthat to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here amI, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want toget rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result ofclass-distinctions. All my notions –notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant,of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful–are essentially middle-classnotions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my tablemanners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements ofmy body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special nicheabout half-way up the social hierarchy.
George Orwell
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
John Updike
Sorrow comes in great waves...but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.
Henry James
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
John Updike
Be more gay, I beseech you!
George Orwell
The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
Terry Eagleton
There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese.
H.L. Mencken
What now strikes as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility;they see everything in terms of individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community exists.
George Orwell
You were reserved for my future
Henry James
Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.
Dorothy Parker
MenThey hail you as their morning starBecause you are the way you are.If you return the sentiment,They'll try to make you different;And once they have you, safe and sound,They want to change you all around.Your moods and ways they put a curse on;They'd make of you another person.They cannot let you go your gait;They influence and educate.They'd alter all that they admired.They make me sick, they make me tired.
Dorothy Parker
The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
John Mason Brown
In heaven an angel is no one in particular.
George Bernard Shaw
The past is a funeral gone by.
Edmund Gosse
I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there.
Orson Scott Card
absinthe removes the bitter taste of failure and grants me strange visions which are charming principally because they cannot be written down. Only in absinthe do I become entirely free and, when I drink it, I understand the symbolic mysteries of odour and of colour.
Peter Ackroyd
someone's senta loving notein lines of returning geeseand as the moon fillsmy western chamberas petals danceover the flowing streamagain I think of youthe two of usliving a sadnessaparta hurt that can't be removedyet when my gaze comes downmy heart stays up
Orson Scott Card
The thing that strikes me more and more, is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time. I don’t mean merely that controversies are acrimonious. They ought to be that when they are on serious subjects. I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point.
George Orwell
Uncertainty is the refuge of hope.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he's not, my mother said.
Hilary Mantel
I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
George Orwell
Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
Ezra Pound
This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency? The ugliness of American decoration, American entertainment, American literature - is not this the visible expression of the impoverishment of the European masses, a manifestation of all the backwardness, deprivation, and want that arrived here in boatloads from Europe? The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof. The European traveler, viewing with distaste a movie palace or a Motorola, is only looking into the terrible concavity of his continent of hunger inverted startlingly into the convex. Our civilization, deformed as it is outwardly, is still an accomplishment; all this had to come to light.
Mary McCarthy
Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where.
Richard Davenport-Hines
And there is neither beginning nor end, nor past nor future; there is only a present, at the same time static and ephemeral, multiple and absolute. It is the vital ocean in which we all share, according to our strength, our needs or our desires.
Rémy de Gourmont
When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons: Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process. n The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors. n The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well. n Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante’s time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare’s time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how. n Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch. n The starters of crazes.Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees’. He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, but he will never be able to sort out what he knows to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old.He will never understand why a specialist is annoyed with him for trotting out a second- or third-hand opinion about the merits of his favourite bad writer. n
Ezra Pound
They’re so brave," she said. "They’re all dead." "Only a coward would think of that," she said scornfully.
Orson Scott Card
Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
John Updike
In a cool solitude of treesWhere leaves and birds a music spin,Mind that was weary is at ease,New rhythms in the soul begin.
William Kean Seymour
The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine-gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use.
George Orwell
As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire.
Hilary Mantel
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
H.L. Mencken
Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.
Meghan O'Rourke
What Althusser does… is to rethink the concept of ideology in terms of Lacan’s ‘imaginary’. For the relation of an individual subject to society as a whole in Althusser’s theory is rather like the relation of the small child to his or her mirror-image in Lacan’s. In both cases, the human subject is supplied with a satisfyingly unified image of selfhood by identifying with an object which reflects this image back to it in a closed, narcissistic circle. In both cases, too, this image involves a misrecognition, since it idealizes the subject’s real situation. The child is not actually as integrated as its image in the mirror suggests; I am not actually the coherent, autonomous, self generating subject I know myself to be in the ideological sphere, but the ‘decentred’ function of several social determinants. Duly enthralled by the image of myself I receive, I subject myself to it; and it is through this ‘subjection’ that I become a subject.
Terry Eagleton
The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, richer, with a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn't noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that this ceremony might be a farce. Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need to hear, the ones the dead have spoken.
John Updike
You mustn't stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.
Hilary Mantel
The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
George Bernard Shaw
Commanders and historians are the people who discuss wars; I was in the infantry, and most of the time I did not know where I was or what I was doing except that I was obeying orders and trying not to be killed in any of the variety of horrible ways open to me.
Robertson Davies
As god is my witness, it was never my intent to throw out the constitution. I thought it was hanging by a thread, and I could save it... You don't save it by cutting that thread. - President Nielson
Orson Scott Card
Faustina is a great work of the Creator. She has nothing of what you call brains; she doesn't need them for her destiny... It is to be glorious for a few years: not to outlive some dull husband and live on his money till she is eighty, going to lectures and comparing the attractions of winter tours that offer the romance of the Caribbean.
Robertson Davies
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
George Orwell
There are certain natures to whom work is nothing the act of work everything.
Arthur Symons
Lost in the corn rows, I remember feeling just another stalk, and thus this country takes me over in the way I occupy myself when I am well . . . completely - to the edge of both my house and body. No one notices, when they walk by, that I am brimming in the doorways.
William H. Gass
No one is exempt and everyone's pain has a different smell. At night, when all the colours die,they hide in pairsand read about themselves—in colour, with their eyelids shut.
Craig Raine