Quotes by Critics - Page 17

My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.
Renata Adler
I do not know how to thank you.''I can tell you,' said Obierika. 'Kill one of your sons for me.''That will not be enough,' said Okonkwo.'Then kill yourself,' said Obierika.
Chinua Achebe
The process of maturing is an art to be learned an effort to be sustained. By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are and if it is good it is better than your youth.
Marya Mannes
I worked for a menial’s hire,Only to learn, dismayed,That any wage I had asked of Life,Life would have willingly paid.
Jessie B. Rittenhouse
Talking to Robespierre, one tried to make the right noises; but what is right, these days? Address yourself to the militant, and you find a pacifist giving you a reproachful look. Address yourself to the idealist, and you’ll find that you’ve fallen into the company of a cheerful, breezy professional politician. Address yourself to means, and you’ll be told to think of ends: to ends, and you’ll be told to think of means. Make an assumption, and you will find it overturned; offer yesterday’s conviction, and today you’ll find it shredded. What did Mirabeau complain of? He believes everything he says. Presumably there was some layer of Robespierre, some deep stratum, where all the contradictions were resolved.
Hilary Mantel
Page after page, advert after advert. Lipsticks, undies, tinned food, patent medicines, slimming cures, face-creams. A sort of cross-section of the money world. A panorama of ignorance, greed, vulgarity, snobbishness, whoredom and disease.
George Orwell
Use your imagination," I tell my students these days, "or someone else is going to use it for you.
Ronald Sukenick
He liked to feel the soft little hand clasping his own fingers, so big and coarse in comparison, and happily so strong. For in the child's weakness he felt an infinite pathos; a being so entirely helpless, so utterly dependent upon others' love, standing there amid a world of cruelties, smiling and trustful.
George Gissing
But shouldn't they still act like children? They aren't normal. They act like--history. Napoleon and Wellington. Caesar and Brutus.
Orson Scott Card
Night is irregular. What is not done in the daytime becomes possible at night: murder and sex and thought. Simple men are driven to early beds by tomorrow's daytime demands and by fear of the dark, and never dream of the irregular world outside. And all the while, a viscount and a spaceport baggage boy might be passing the night rolling bok ball in the city park. That's more than unusual -- that is irregular.
Alexei Panshin
It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous. Even the most logical religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions, and just as willing to die for them. Every theologian spends a large part of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and against God.
H.L. Mencken
While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.
Chinua Achebe
If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality.
George Orwell
There are 2,500 kinds of sponges, all of them consist largely of holes.
Will Cuppy
We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreams.
Orson Scott Card
The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.
James Agate
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
George Orwell
It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain
George Orwell
Years ago, my mother and I fell in love with Busybee’s voice, its calm, even tone, and a smile which was always audible in the language. My father, meanwhile, is clipping his nails fastidiously, letting them fall on to an old, spread-out copy of the Times of India, till he sneezes explosively, as he customarily does, sending the crescent-shaped nail-clippings flying into the universe.
Amit Chaudhuri
We need imperfection in our relationships, else we would die from the thickness of intimacy.
Gail Caldwell
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy but that it is a bore.
H.L. Mencken
If there were no goodness in people, mankind would still be confined to loping across a Savannah somewhere on Earth, watching the elephants rule, or some other more compassionate species.
Orson Scott Card
Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it....
George Bernard Shaw
The Garden En robe de parade. - SamainLike a skein of loose silk blown against a wallShe walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,And she is dying piece-mealof a sort of emotional anaemia.And round about there is a rabbleOf the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.They shall inherit the earth.In her is the end of breeding.Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.She would like some one to speak to her,And is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion.
Ezra Pound
The most silent people are generally those who think most highly of themselves.
William Hazlitt
Man begins by loving love and ends by loving a woman. Woman begins by loving a man and ends by loving love.
Rémy de Gourmont
Security depends not so much upon how much you have as upon how much you can do without.
Joseph Wood Krutch
Death is a terrifying experience... It threatens, with its corrosive power, our possibility of living a humane life. There are two kinds of experiences that can protect those---those able to turn to them---from the terror of the danger of death. One is the certainty of truth, the continuous awakening toward the understanding of the 'ineluctable need for truth,' without which a good life is not possible. The other is the resolute and profound illusion that life has meaning and that the meaning of life is found in performing good deeds.
Ricardo Piglia
Ambition has but one reward for all: A little power a little transient fame A grave to rest in and a fading name!
William Winter
And even those who claim to read the Bible literally and to lead their lives according to its precepts are, in actual practice, highly selective about which parts of the Bible they live by and which they don't. Jesus' condemnations of wealth and war are generally ignored; so are Levitical prohibitions on eating pork, wearing mixed fabrics and so forth. Though legalistic Christians accuse nonlegalistic Christians of selective interpretation and relativistic morality (of adjusting the Bible, in short, to suit their own lifestyles and prejudices), what is usually happening is that nonlegalists are, as the Baptist tradition puts it, reading the Bible with Jesus as their criterion, while the legalists are, without any philosophical consistency whatsoever, embracing those laws and doctrines that affirm their own predilections and prejudices and ignoring the rest.
Bruce Bawer
What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?
Peter Ackroyd
Poverty is spiritual halitosis.
George Orwell
And shall I still be allowed to wear ribbons in my mane?" asked Mollie."Comrade," said Snowball, "those ribbons that you are so devoted to are the badge of slavery. Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than ribbons?"Mollie agreed, but she did not sound very convinced.
George Orwell
Popular! In America, what else matters?
Joyce Carol Oates
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
Thomas de Quincey
A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
Margaret Fuller
I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.
Joyce Carol Oates
Though old the thought and oft exprest 'tis his at last who says it best.
James Russell Lowell
All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
James Russell Lowell
The outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality. Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?
George Orwell
If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all.
George Bernard Shaw
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: wlien the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
George Bernard Shaw
It is a madness to make fortune the mistress of events because in herself she is nothing but is ruled by prudence.
John Dryden
The pity is not that there is a myth of Sylvia Plath but that the myth is not simply that of an enormously gifted poet whose death came carelessly, by mistake, and too soon.
Al Álvarez
New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its predicted end ... it is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization the first permanent civilization in America.
Bernard de Voto
Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.
George Bernard Shaw
Peace is not only better than war but infinitely more arduous.
George Bernard Shaw
She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ...
John Updike
I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.
Margaret Fuller
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.” —
Joyce Carol Oates
See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be
Joyce Carol Oates
A thousand things advance nine hundred and ninety-nine retreat that is progress.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Reason with most people means their own opinions.
William Hazlitt
Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.
George Bernard Shaw
A few years ago, a taxi driver told me about a club & a dog. A waiter taught me a lesson about ladders today. Life is full of class sessions for those who have passion & listen.
Indeewara Jayawardane
I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.
Hippolyte Taine
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
James Russell Lowell
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
James Russell Lowell
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever.
George Orwell
When people say: she's got everything I've only one answer: I haven't had tomorrow.
Elizabeth Taylor