Quotes by Critics - Page 21

All mountain landscapes hold stories: the ones we read, the ones we dream, and the ones we create.-from the Editor's Note, The Alpinist (April 1, 2010)
George Michael Sinclair Kennedy
The theme of invisibility has haunted me for many years, since earliest girlhood. A woman often feels ‘invisible’ in a public sense precisely because her physical being - her ‘visibility’ - figures so prominently in her identity. She is judged as a body, she is ‘attractive’ or ‘unattractive’, while knowing that her deepest self is inward, and secret: knowing, hoping that her spiritual essence is a great deal more complex than the casual eye of the observer will allow… it might be argued that all persons, defined to themselves rather more as what they think and dream than what they do, are ‘invisible’.
Joyce Carol Oates
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
H.L. Mencken
Terrorism & tourism rhyme with each other. Yet they don't go well alongside despite some similiarities shared. If one booms it is doomsday to the other. It is sheer juxtaposition between the two lucrative industries in the city of the lights left in a sorry plight.
Indeewara Jayawardane
The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.
George Bernard Shaw
Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.
Terry Eagleton
We are no longer so lacking in fantasy as to uphold the existence of a god.
Carl Einstein
The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.
Joyce Carol Oates
What is cheaper than lust or of less value than alchemy or aphrodisiacs?
Avram Davidson
I have always had the greatest respect for students. There is nothing I hate more than condescension—the attitude that they are inferior to you. I always assume they have good minds.
Mark Van Doren
The finer natures were those that shone at the larger times.
Henry James
Happiness is a way station between too much and too little.
Channing Pollock
The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.
George Bernard Shaw
Genius is the power of lighting one's own fire!
John Forster
Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.
John Leonard
Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.
George Orwell
The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.
Brooks Atkinson
England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.
George Orwell
It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything – anything – but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you.
George Orwell
Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don't know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you've been told, what the words suggest.
Joyce Carol Oates
The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.
Joyce Carol Oates
Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.
Joyce Carol Oates
You will think you take generous views of her; but you will never begin to know through what a strange sea of feeling she passed before she accepted you. As she stood there in front of you the other day, she plunged into it. She said 'Why not?' to something which, a few hours earlier, had been inconceivable. She turned about on a thousand gathered prejudices and traditions as on a pivot, and looked where she had never looked hitherto.
Henry James
...you seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making mistakes and prove how smart you are to the other students. This is such a pointless, stupid way of listening to teachers that it is clear you are going to waste months of our time before you finally catch on that the only transaction that matters is a transfer of useful information from adults who possess it to children who do not, and that catching mistakes is a criminal misuse of time.
Orson Scott Card
The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out.
George Bernard Shaw
Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.
H.L. Mencken
American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
H.L. Mencken
For with dandies, a joke is the only way of making yourself respected.
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
Married women are kept women and they are beginning to find it out.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Abroad? Oh no. I went to England in ’91, and you stood in the garden at Fontenay and berated me.” He shook his head. “This is my nation. Here I stay. A man can’t carry his country on the soles of his shoes.
Hilary Mantel
It's just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it's quite difficult, sir to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in street and stamped on.Pg.406
Hilary Mantel
Jenny kissed me when we met Jumping from the chair she sat in Time you thief who love to get Sweets into your list put that in. Say I'm weary say I'm sad Say that health and wealth have missed me Say I'm growing old but add Jenny kissed me.
Leigh Hunt
As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what "just living" might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.
Orson Scott Card
Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! Don't you like this?
George Orwell
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
When sonneteering Wordsworth re-creates the landing of Mary Queen of Scots at the mouth of the Derwent -Dear to the Loves, and to the Graces vowed,The Queen drew back the wimple that she wore- he unveils nothing less than a canvas by Rubens, baroque master of baroque masters; this is the landing of a TRAGIC Marie de Medicis.Yet so receptive was the English ear to sheep-Wordsworth's perverse 'Enough of Art' that it is not any of these works of supreme art, these master-sonnets of English literature, that are sold as picture postcards, with the text in lieu of the view, in the Lake District! it is those eternally, infernally sprightly Daffodils.
Brigid Brophy
He was terrified by the sublime horror of it, for intensity of feeling, carried to this degree, is sublime. ("A Woman's Vengeance")
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
As is our confidence so is our capacity.
William Hazlitt
A robin perched on the branch of the apple tree, his feathers ruffled, his red chest blazing.'No need to look so down in the mouth,' he chirruped. 'Things'll get worse before they get better.''I don't know what it is about that tree,' Geno grumbled, 'that makes everything that sits in it talk in proverbs.''It's easier than thinking,' the robin stated.
Felix Salten
This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.
George Orwell
A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.
George Bernard Shaw
It is essential to the triumph of reform that it shall never succeed.
William Hazlitt
Sooner
 or 
later 
it 
would 
happen: 
strength 
would 
change
 into 
consciousness.
George Orwell
Yet the laboriously sought musical epiphany rarely compares to the unsought, even unwanted tune whose ambush is violent and sudden: the song the cab driver was tuned to, the song rumbling from the speaker wedged against the fire-escape railing, the song tingling from the transistor on the beach blanket. To locate those songs again can become, with age, something like a religious quest, as suggested by the frequent use of the phrase "Holy Grail" to describe hard-to-find tracks. The collector is haunted by the knowledge that somewhere on the planet an intact chunk of his past still exists, uncorrupted by time or circumstance.
Geoffrey O'Brien
The term bohemian has a bad reputation because it's allied to myriad clichés, but Parisians originally adopted the term, associated with nomadic Gypsies, to describe artists and writers who stayed up all night and ignored the pressures of the industrial world.
Sarah Thornton
I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely.
Lee Siegel
Black is bountiful. White is witful. Together they are beautiful.
Indeewara Jayawardane
The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.
Renata Adler
It shows a mediocre architect at the top of his game [on the Beetham Tower in Manchester]
Owen Hatherley
He has never told anyone this story. He doesn't mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past--within reason--but he doesn't mean to give away pieces of himself.
Hilary Mantel
England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
George Orwell
One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.
Logan Pearsall Smith
My debt to you Beloved Is one I cannot pay In any coin of any realm On any reckoning day.
Jessie Rittenhouse
Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor. For me, at least, I can declare that when I wrote THINGS FALL APART I couldn't have told anyone the day before it was accepted for publication that anybody was going to read it. There was no guarantee; nobody ever said to me, Go and write this, we will publish it and we will read it; it was just there. But my brother-in-law who was not a particularly voracious reader, told me that he read the novel through the night and it gave him a terrible headache the next morning. And I took that as an encouraging endorsement!The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures and situations.
Chinua Achebe
Be not afraid of life believe that life is worth living and your belief will create the fact.
Henry James
History is about longing and belonging. It is about the need for permanence and the perception of continuity. It concerns the atavistic desire to find deep sources of identity. We live again in the twelfth or in the fifteenth century, finding echoes and resonances of our own time; we may recognise that some things, such as piety and passion, are never lost; we may also conclude that the great general drama of the human spirit is ever fresh and ever renewed. That is why some of the greatest writers have preferred to see English history as dramatic or epic poetry, which is just as capable of expressing the power and movement of history as any prose narrative; it is a form of singing around a fire.
Peter Ackroyd
Valentine went back to class without answering. That night Demosthenes published a scathing denunciation of the population limitation laws. People should be allowed to have as many children as they like, and the surplus population should be sent to other worlds, to spread mankind so far across the galaxy that no danger, no invasion could ever threaten the human race with annihilation. "The most noble title any child can have," Demosthenes wrote, "is Third.
Orson Scott Card
The perceiving our own weaknesses enables us to give others excellent advice, but it does not teach us to to reform ourselves.
William Hazlitt
The sun's gone dim, and the moon's gone black. For I loved him, and he didn't love back.
Dorothy Parker
In some situations, if you say nothing, you are called dull; if you talk, you are thought impertinent and arrogant. It is hard to know what to do in this case. The question seems to be, whether your vanity or your prudence predominates.
William Hazlitt