Quotes by Critics - Page 18

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it....
George Bernard Shaw
Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.
Harriet Van Home
If you asked me to marry you all over again today I'd say yes, said Valentine.And if I had only met you for the first time today, I'd ask.
Orson Scott Card
Summer days, and the flat water meadows and the blue hills in the distance, and the willows up the backwater and the pools underneath like a kind of deep green glass. Summer evenings, the fish breaking the water, the nightjars hawking round your head, the smell of nightstocks and latakia. Don’t mistake what I’m talking about. It’s not that I’m trying to put across any of that poetry of childhood stuff. I know that’s all baloney. Old Porteous (a friend of mine, a retired schoolmaster, I’ll tell you about him later) is great on the poetry of childhood. Sometimes he reads me stuff about it out of books. Wordsworth. Lucy Gray. There was a time when meadow, grove, and all that. Needless to say he’s got no kids of his own. The truth is that kids aren’t in any way poetic, they’re merely savage little animals, except that no animal is a quarter as selfish.A boy isn’t interested in meadows, groves, and so forth. He never looks at a landscape, doesn’tgive a damn for flowers, and unless they affect him in some way, such as being good to eat, he doesn’t know one plant from another. Killing things - that’s about as near to poetry as a boy gets. And yet all the while there’s that peculiar intensity, the power of longing for things as you can’t long when you’re grown up, and the feeling that time stretches out and out in front of you and that whatever you’re doing you could go on for ever.
George Orwell
The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.
Ezra Pound
To die hating them, that was freedom
George Orwell
Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.
George Bernard Shaw
There was something fundamentally embarrassing about being a young woman...[the] embarrassment of wanting to be more assured, more substantive, more whole, of moving to tap resources that simply weren't there.
Michelle Orange
Two mystic states can be dissociated: the ecstatic-beneficent-and-benevolent, contemplation of the divine love, the divine splendour with goodwill toward others.And the bestial, namely the fanatical, the man on fire with God and anxious to stick his snotty nose into other men's business or reprove his neighbour for having a set of tropisms different from that of the fanatic's, or for having the courage to live more greatly and openly.The second set of mystic states is manifest in scarcity economists, in repressors etc.The first state is a dynamism. It has, time and again, driven men to great living, it has given them courage to go on for decades in the face of public stupidity. It is paradisical and a reward in itself seeking naught further... perhaps because a feeling of certitude inheres in the state of feeling itself. The glory of life exists without further proof for this mystic.
Ezra Pound
More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader and would no more read a book alone if they could help it than have a baby alone.
Randall Jarrell
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell
The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.
George Bernard Shaw
Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.
Henry James
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
John Updike
My only policy is to profess evil and do good.
George Bernard Shaw
The great fact all the while however had been the incalculability; since he had supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change. He actually saw that he *had* allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined. Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, the ugly things of his far away youth, when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the ugly--these uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the 'swagger' things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay. They were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn't a certain finer truth saved the situation. He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over *all* for the monstrosities; he had come, not only in the last analysis but quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had nothing to do. ("The Jolly Corner")
Henry James
The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.
Rémy de Gourmont
This level reach of blue is not my sea; Here are sweet waters, pretty in the sun,Whose quiet ripples meet obediently A marked and measured line, one after one. This is no sea of mine. that humbly laves Untroubled sands, spread glittering and warm. I have a need of wilder, crueler waves; They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm. So let a love beat over me again, Loosing its million desperate breakers wide; Sudden and terrible to rise and wane; Roaring the heavens apart; a reckless tide That casts upon the heart, as it recedes, Splinters and spars and dripping, salty weeds.
Dorothy Parker
Yoga is just gymnastics for uncoordinated people.
Claire Dederer
I think you can tell when you meet someone whether they read novels. There's some hollowness if they don't.
Philip Hensher
A strong passion for any object will ensure success for the desire of the end will point out the means.
William Hazlitt
One learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence.
Robertson Davies
People see a Macbeth film. They imagine they have seen Macbeth, and don't want to see it again; so when your Mr. Hackett or somebody comes round to act the play, he finds the house empty. That is what has happened to dozens of good plays whose authors have allowed them to be filmed. It shall not happen to mine if I can help it.
George Bernard Shaw
You haven't lived until you died in New York.
Alexander Woollcott
It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are.
George Orwell
the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools...It's not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.
Meghan O'Rourke
The whole world is strewn with snares traps gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women.
George Bernard Shaw
Come! our world is done:For all the witchery of the world is fled,And lost all wanton wisdom long since won.
Lionel Pigot Johnson
Gradually, we have become each other's weather.
Paul Zweig
Better to hunt in fields, for health unbought,Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.The wise, for cure, on exercise depend;God never made his work for man to mend.
John Dryden
You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
H.L. Mencken
Alles wat ik van het leven weet maakte ik me buiten de muren van de school eigen, en zodra ik me binnen die muren bevond leek het of ik achterwaarts leefde.
Gerrit Komrij
A novel is a static thing that one moves through a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.
Kenneth Tynan
Those who are fond of setting things to rights have no great objection to setting them wrong.
William Hazlitt
I looked up fairness in the dictionary and it was not there.
William Giraldi
Guils is the greatest weapon vecause its cuts rarely heal and it aims for the heart
Orson Scott Card
All that men really understand is confined to a very small compass to their daily affairs and experience to what they have an opportunity to know and motives to study or practise. The rest is affectation and imposture.
William Hazlitt
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
H.L. Mencken
Each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the foundation of the world.
William Dean Howells
Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.
George E. Woodberry
A few alligators are naturally of the vicious type and inclined to resent it when you prod them with a stick. You can find out which ones these are by prodding them.
Will Cuppy
It was thy kiss Love that made me immortal.
Margaret Fuller
The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.
Joyce Carol Oates
He was a dim secondary social success -- and all with people who had truly not an idea of him. It was all mere surface sound, this murmur of their welcome, this popping of their corks -- just as his gestures of response were the extravagant shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of some game of 'ombres chinoises' [French: "shadow play"].
Henry James
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm.
Ezra Pound
By its nature a relationship was not an accomplishment. It was just a connection that happened to exist, for as long as it did exist.
Caleb Crain
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
George Bernard Shaw
The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination
George Bernard Shaw
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw
The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it.
Gail Caldwell
The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure.
George Bernard Shaw
When you have a good romance, find ways to make their lives miserable and hellish...Do you think 'Titanic' would have been so popular if they had both lived? Not a prayer.
Orson Scott Card
Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart into you? Invention, energy, wit, style, charm--they've all got to be paid for in hard cash.
George Orwell
The foreign correspondent is frequently the only means of getting an important story told, or of drawing the world's attention to disasters in the making or being covered up. Such an important role is risky in more ways than one. It can expose the correspondent to actual physical danger; but there is also the moral danger of indulging in sensationalism and dehumanizing the sufferer. This danger immediately raises the question of the character and attitude of the correspondent, because the same qualities of mind which in the past separated a Conrad from a Livingstone, or a Gainsborough from the anonymous painter of Francis Williams, are still present and active in the world today. Perhaps this difference can best be put in one phrase: the presence or absence of respect for the human person.
Chinua Achebe
He claimed to be a Marxist, the only one of his claims I believed. He had that Marxist passion for oysters and good Sancerre, and that Marxist paralysis when the waiter brought the check. Already it’s obvious how much the Communists got wrong, overbetting on human high-mindedness, lowballing human desire.
Francine Prose
Sure, there are good things, lots, sure, blow jobs, chocolate mousse, winning streaks, the warm fire in your enemy’s house, good book, hunk of cheese, flagon of ale, office raise, championship ring, the misfortunes of others, sure, good things, beyond count, queens, kings, old clocks, comfy clothes, lots, innumerable items in stock, baseball cards and bingo buttons, pot-au-feu, listen, we could go on and on like a long speech, sure it’s a great world, sights to see, canyons full of canyon, corn on the cob, the eroded great pyramids, contaminated towns, eroded hillsides, deleafed trees, those whitened limbs stark and noble in the evening light, geeeez, what gobs of good things, no shit, service elevators, what would we do without, and all the inventions of man, Krazy Glue and food fights, girls wrestling amid mounds of Jell-O, drafts of dark beer, no end of blue sea, formerly full of fish, eroded hopes, eruptions of joy, because we’re winning, have won, won, won what? the . . . the Title.
William H. Gass
Use your health even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die do not outlive yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure’s sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in ‘horse’ and ‘tail’: one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation.
Terry Eagleton
Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life.
John Updike
Work is the province of cattle.
Dorothy Parker