Quotes by Critics - Page 22

They must talk to each other directly, Ender, mind to mind. What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also re-member. Why would they ever develop language? Why would they ever learn to read and write? How would they know what reading and writing were if they saw them? Or signals? Or numbers? Or anything that we use to communicate? This isn’t just a matter of translating from one language to another. They don’t have a language at all. We used every means we could think of to communicate with them, but they don’t even have the machinery to know we’re signaling. And maybe they’ve been trying to think to us, and they can’t understand why we don’t respond.
Orson Scott Card
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
George Orwell
When preparing for Book One, I talked to a couple of psychiatrists about psychosomatic phenomena, neuroses and dissociative conditions, for example the so—called hysterical blindness suffered by many who saw the Killing Fields in Pol Pot’s Cambodia: their eyes objectively see, but they are not aware of it and are blind because they believe they can’t see. One specialist told me that among modern Western people, ’metaphorical’ symptoms such as Fredy or those Cambodians evince are much rarer now than earlier in the twentieth century or before. Nowadays most people are better equipped by education to verbalise their neuroses, and have lots of jargon in which to do so. For most of the dissociative dimension, I could draw on things I knew from within myself.
Les Murray
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton you may as well make it dance.
George Bernard Shaw
When you walk on the face of a world, then forgiveness comes.
Orson Scott Card
That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.
Dorothy Parker
The solid earth sways like the treacherous sea beneath the feet of men and spirits alike when the innocent are slain in the name of law, and their wrongs are undone by slandering the pure of heart.
George Bernard Shaw
Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.
Orson Scott Card
It was a pity that people did not risk enough to speak out in behalf of one another's happiness and their own.
Louis Zukofsky
The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
H.L. Mencken
Hive Queen: They never know anything. They don't have enough years in their little lives to come to an understanding of anything at all. And yet they think they understand. From earliest childhood, they delude themselves into thinking they comprehend the world, while all that's really going on is that they've got some primitive assumptions and prejudices. As they get older they learn a more elevated vocabulary in which to express their mindless pseudo- knowledge and bully other people into accepting their prejudices as if they were truth, but it all amounts to the same thing. Individually, human beings are all dolts.Pequenino: While collectively...Hive Queen: Collectively, they're a collection of dolts. But in all their scurrying around and pretending to be wise, throwing out idiotic half-understood theories about this and that, one or two of them will come up with some idea that is just a little bit closer to the truth than what was already known. And in a sort of fumbling trial and error, about half the time the truth actually rises to the top and becomes accepted by people who still don't understand it, who simply adopt it as a new prejudice to be trusted blindly until the next dolt accidentally comes up with an improvement.>Pequenino: So you're saying that no one is ever individually intelligent, and groups are even stupider than individuals-- and yet by keeping so many fools engaged in pretending to be intelligent, they still come up with some of the same results that an intelligent species would come up with.Hive Queen: Exactly.
Orson Scott Card
Time wasted is a theft from God.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Suddenly they were both leaping around him, shouting 'Traitor!' and 'Thought-criminal!', the little girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gamboling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters.
George Orwell
I'll go from world to world until I find a time and place where you can come awake in safety. And I'll tell your story to my people, so that perhaps in time the can forgive you, too. The way that you've forgiven me.
Orson Scott Card
The thing about her is, she’s good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they’re a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature.
John Updike
... because the Legs wasn't fearful of heights or swimming in rough water or Death itself she wasn't afraid to risk making a fool of herself. Maybe you think that's something of no consequence but it isn't - for making a fool of yourself, offering yourself to others to laugh at, to jeer, that takes guts.
Joyce Carol Oates
Mr. Brown had thought of nothing but numbers. He should have known that the kingdom of God did not depend on large crowds. Our Lord Himself stressed the importance of fewness. Narrow is the way and few the number. To fill the Lord's holy temple with an idolatrous crowd clamoring for signs was a folly of everlasting consequence. Our Lord used the whip only once in His life - to drive the crowd away from His church.
Chinua Achebe
There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.
Hilary Mantel
Actors are the only honest hypocrites.
William Hazlitt
Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
Terry Eagleton
CHARTERIS [unfolding his arms in terror] No, please. Dont. As a philosopher, it’s my business to tell other people the truth; but it’s not their business to tell it to me. I dont like it: it hurts.
George Bernard Shaw
I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.
George Orwell
Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room.
William Hazlitt
Are you using me simply as a vulgar tool? Don't you care for me the least little bit? Let me suggest that for a girl in your-your ambiguous position, you are too proud, by several shades. Don't go back to Roger in a hurry! You're not the unspotted maiden you were but two short days ago. Who am I, what am I, to the people whose opinion you care for? A very low fellow, madam; and yet with me you've gone far to cast your lot. If you're not prepared to do more, you should have done less. Nora, Nora," he went on, breaking into a vein none the less revolting for being more ardent, "I confess I don't understand you! But the more you puzzle me the more you fascinate me; and the less you like me the more I love you. What has there been between you and Lawrence? Hang me if I can understand! Are you an angel of purity, or are you the most audacious of flirts?
Henry James
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H.L. Mencken
...What was wrong between Diana and me was that she was too much a mother to me, and as I had had one mother, and lost her, I was not in a hurry to acquire another--not even a young and beautiful one with whom I could play Oedipus to both our hearts' content. If I could manage it, I had no intention of being anybody's own dear laddie, ever again.
Robertson Davies
Let us be of good cheer remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen.
James Russell Lowell
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
George Bernard Shaw
In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
Orson Scott Card
In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything.
Chinua Achebe
Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
George Orwell
What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never know why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even know themselves. Nobody understands anybody.
Orson Scott Card
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure.
H.L. Mencken
Though familiarity may not breed contempt it takes off the edge of admiration.
William Hazlitt
There are miracles even reactivity can't pull off, Ender
Orson Scott Card
I begin to realize that my memory is a great catacomb, and that below my actual standing-ground there is layer after layer of historical ashes. Is the life of mind something like that of great trees of immemorial growth? Is the living layer of consciousness super-imposed upon hundreds of dead layers? Dead? No doubt this is too much to say, but still, when memory is slack the past becomes almost as though it had never been. To remember that we did know once is not a sign of possession but a sign of loss; it is like the number of an engraving which is no longer on its nail, the title of a volume no longer to be found on its shelf. My mind is the empty frame of a thousand vanished images.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Patience and gentleness is power.
Leigh Hunt
Conquering any difficulty always gives one a secret joy, for it means pushing back a boundary line and adding to one's liberty.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
John Updike
There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.
Joyce Carol Oates
It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are.
George Orwell
Ours must be the first age whose great goal on a nonmaterial plane is not fulfillment but adjustment.
Louis Kronenberger
It's my experience that you first feel the impulse to write in your chest. It's like falling in love, only more so. It feels like something criminal. It feels like unspeakably wild sex. So, think: When you feel the overpowering need to go out and find some unspeakably wild sex, do you rush to tell your mom about it?
Carolyn See
I’ve always found that the better the book I’m reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able I am to imagine that I might, someday, become smarter.
Francine Prose
While reading the Times of India each morning, my father spares a minute for the cartoon by R. K. Laxman. While my mother is, like a magician, making untidy sheets disappear in the bedroom and producing fresh towels in the bathroom, or braving bad weather in the kitchen, my father, in the extraordinary Chinese calm of the drawing-room, is dmiring the cartoon by R. K. Laxman, and, if my mother happens to be there, unselfishly sharing it with her. She, as expected, misunderstands it completely, laughing not at the joke but at the expressions on the faces of the caricatures, and at the hilarious fact that they talk to each other like human beings.
Amit Chaudhuri
Nobody could stand an eternity of Heaven.
George Bernard Shaw
Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
Terry Eagleton
We inherited a strong and flourishing country, and instead of making the investments - that is, the sacrifices - to maintain it, we chose to suck it dry and stick our children with the bill. If you want to see who is to blame for student debt, just look in the mirror. And if parents find themselves supporting kids beyond their college years, that is only, in the aggregate, a form of compensatory justice: the intergenerational transfer of wealth that should have been effected through taxation.
William Deresiewicz
All the words I have to say have turned into stars.
Guillaume Apollinaire
Is there no end to this escalation of desire?
Marya Mannes
Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.
George Bernard Shaw
Growth is betrayal.
John Updike
I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind.
H.L. Mencken
Look at what I wrote at the beginning of this memoir. Have I caught anything at all of the extraordinary night when Paul Dempster was born? I am pretty sure that my little sketch of Percy Boyd Staunton is accurate, but what about myself? I have always sneered at autobiographies and memoirs in which the writer appears at the beginning as a charming, knowing little fellow, possessed of insights and perceptions beyond his years, yet offering these with false naivete to the reader, as though to say, 'What a little wonder I was, but All Boy.' Have the writers any notion or true collection of what a boy is?I have and I have reinforced it by forty-five years of teaching boys. A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man. Oh these autobiographies in which the writer postures and simpers as a David Copperfield or a Huck Finn! False, false as harlots' oaths!Can I write truly of my boyhood? Or will that disgusting self-love which so often attaches itself to a man's idea of his youth creep in and falsify the story? I can but try. And to begin I must give you some notion of the village in which Percy Boyd Staunton and Paul Dempster and I were born.
Robertson Davies
If there ever were one moment where everything worked for us, where we lived in harmony and at ease with our natures, then we would still be there. There is no garden to return to, no idyllic perfect childhood, no enwombed state. The Garden of Eden was boring, childhood is a nightmare we should all be grateful to be done with, and your mother smoked while she was pregnant and poisoned you in the womb with artificial sugar substitutes. The best thing any of us can do is just to keep fucking up in a forward motion, and see what comes out of it.
Jessa Crispin
Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products
Larry McCaffrey
What when drunk one sees in other women one sees in Garbo sober.
Kenneth Tynan
Do not be disingenuous with me, Colonel Graff. Americans are quite apt at playing stupid when they choose to, but I am not to be deceived.
Orson Scott Card
...What I depend on is a vigorous audience that can discover sweetness and light, beauty and truth, beyond the ability of the artist, on his own, to create them.
Orson Scott Card