Quotes by Critics - Page 26

There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
James Russell Lowell
If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault.
Orson Scott Card
What to AcceptThe fact of mountains. The actualityOf any stone — by kicking, if necessary. The need to ignore stupid people, While restraining one's natural impulseTo murder them. The change from your dollar, Be it no more than a penny, For without a pretense of universal penuryThere can be no honor between rich and poor.Love, unconditionally, or until proven false.The inevitability of cancer and/orHeart disease. The dialogue as written, Once you've taken the role. Failure, Gracefully. Any hospitalityYou're willing to return. The airEach city offers you to breathe.The latest hit. Assistance.All accidents. The end.
Thomas M. Disch
When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose—not simply accept—the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person.
George Orwell
The risen Christ! Once morefaith is upon us, a jubilant brief keeningwith respite:Obedience, bitter joy,the elements, clouds,winds, louvres where the bellmakes its wild mouths:Holy Rus – into the rain’shorizons, peacock-dyed tail feathers of storm,so it goes on.
Geoffrey Hill
who would expect less?" she said. " You're a Wiggin." " Whatever that means." He said. " It means that you are going to make a difference in the world.
Orson Scott Card
[..] the great modern commandment - the eleventh commandment which has wiped out all the others: 'Thou shalt not lose thy job.
George Orwell
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide ... And the choice goes by forever t'wixt that darkness and that light.
James Russell Lowell
A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.
John Dennis
NW" is full of split selves, people alienated from the very things they thought defined them. Their nostalgia -- for old movies, old songs, buses they don't ride anymore -- is less a salve than a form of pain.
Christian Lorentzen
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they might have been.
William Hazlitt
My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.
John Updike
Forget the fictional characters – how many authors are being stopped on the street?
Joshua Cohen
America is a land where men govern, but women rule.
John Mason Brown
Time is a great legalizer even in the fields of morals.
H.L. Mencken
A critic is a legless man who teaches other people to run
Channing Pollock
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
H.L. Mencken
And of a Sunday swarm the folkUnder the honeysuckle vine, Quaffing, the while they talk and smoke, The sun, the melody, the wine.
Théophile Gautier
If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may study his commentators.
William Hazlitt
* *Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.*Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.
George Orwell
And that's what we'll do every day. If you or your friends spray-paint obscenities on our walls, we'll scrub them off, and the people will come. if you break our windows, we'll fix them, and the people will come. If you hurt us, we'll wash off the blood, slap on some bandages and the people will come...any wound you inflict, we'll stitch up. We're not going to stop, no matter what you do. This work is too important. Too many lives are at stake.
Robert J. Wiersema
They sicken of the calm who know the storm.
Dorothy Parker
I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.
Edith Sitwell
Human: That's stupid. Isn't there grass on both sides?
Orson Scott Card
I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.
Dorothy Parker
He sees daily evidence that many things held to be true by nine-tenths of all men are, in reality, false, and he is thereby apt to acquire a doubt of everything, including his own beliefs.
H.L. Mencken
Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels put dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. As strata of rock shift, your fingers elongate, and your teeth are distended sideways in a great underground grimace indistinguishable from a strip of chalk. And the earth tumbles on, and the sun expires, and unaltering darkness reigns where once there were stars.
John Updike
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
George Bernard Shaw
You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal.
Joyce Carol Oates
London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.
Dorothy Parker
But now, you are twain, you are cloven apartFlesh of his flesh, but heart of my heart.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.
George Orwell
Home was merely a dull ache in the back of his memory. A tiredness in his eyes.
Orson Scott Card
One criticism of Freud still sometimes heard on the political Left is that his thinking is individualist — that he substitutes ‘private’ psychological causes and explanations for social and historical ones. This accusation reflects a radical misunderstanding of Freudian theory. There is indeed a real problem about how social and historical factors are related to the unconscious; but one point of Freud’s work is that it makes it possible for us to think of the development of the human individual in social and historical terms. What Freud produces, indeed, is nothing less than a materialist theory of the making of the human subject. We come to be what we are by an interrelation of bodies — by the complex transactions which take place during infancy between our bodies and those which surround us. This is not a biological reductionism: Freud does not of course believe that we are nothing but our bodies, or that our minds are mere reflexes of them. Nor is it an asocial model of life, since the bodies which surround us, and our relations with them, are always socially specific.
Terry Eagleton
The years I have squandered in puerile excitement, in going hither and thither, in seeking to force nature and time, I ought to have spent in solitude and meditation, in endeavoring to make myself worthy of being loved.
Théophile Gautier
Maybe that's all demons ever are. People like us, doing things without even knowing what we're doing.
Orson Scott Card
Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.
Olivia Laing
He lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being overwhelmed again. In mystery novels people died like dolls being discarded; in science fiction enormities of space and time conspired to crush the humans ; and even in P.G. Wodehouse he felt a hollowness, a turning away from reality that was implicitly bitter, and became explicit in the comic figures of futile parsons.
John Updike
Now students all seem to be converging on the same self, the successful upper-middle-class professional, impersonating the adult they've already decided they want to become.
William Deresiewicz
Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.
George Orwell
Liquor is the chloroform which enables the poor man to endure the painful operation of living.
George Bernard Shaw
Besides," said Suriyawong. "This was not a rescue operation.""What was it, target practice? Chinese skeet?""An offer of transportation to an invited guest of the Hegemon," said Suriyawong. "And the loan of a knife."Achilles held up the bloody thing, dangling it from the point. "Yours?" he asked."Unless you want to clean it," said Suriyawong.Achillese handed it to him. Suriyawong took out his cleaning kit and wiped down the blade, then began to polish it."You wanted me to die," said Achilles quietly."I expected you to solve your own problems," said Suriyawong.
Orson Scott Card
Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
V.S. Pritchett
If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
George Orwell
Taste is a mystery.
Daniel Mendelsohn
We grow neither better nor worse as we get old but more like ourselves
May Lamberton Becker
No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
George Bernard Shaw
Tis always morning somewhere in the world.
Richard Hengest Horne
Still, we permit the appearance of our meats, sauces, fruits, and vdgetables to dominate our tongues until it is difficult to divide a twist of lemon or squeeze of lime from the colors of their rinds or separate yellow from its yolk or chocolate from the quenchless brown which seems to be the root, shoot, stalk, and bloom of it. Yet I hardly think the eggplant's taste is as purple as its skin. In fact, there are few flavors at the violet end, odors either, for the acrid smell of blue smoke is deceiving, as is the tooth of the plum, though there may be just a hint of blue in the higher sauces. Perceptions are always profound, associations deceiving. No watermelon tastes red. Apropos: while waiting for a bus once, I saw open down the arm of a midfat, midlife, freckled woman, suitcase tugging at her hand like a small boy needing to pee, a deep blue crack as wide as any in a Roquefort. Split like paper tearing. She said nothing. Stood. Blue bubbled up in the opening like tar. One thing is certain: a cool flute blue tastes like deep well water drunk from a cup.
William H. Gass
The distinction between "assistant" and intern" is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not.But of course interns are paid, in experience.
Joyce Carol Oates
Our anxieties were driving us to become other people-he was Earner; I was Mother, like characters in some phenomenally boring Ionesco play. We both worried all the time and often didn't remember to laugh. I could find relief in the baby's smile, or with my friends, or now, in yoga. I didn't see that Bruce was headed someplace where there was no relief.
Claire Dederer
Dominique (who, like other Catamount girls, had a cache of pills for every occasion) offered me a bennie- Benzedrine?- to elevate my spirits. Adamantly I told her, No thanks! I wanted to face what's called reality with my eyes open.I've made that a principle for my life. Sometimes I wonder if this has been a wise decision.
Joyce Carol Oates
It is very strange that the years teach us patience - that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.
Elizabeth Taylor
The process of self-invention is never-ending; writer, like children, are always growing into their gifts. (Susan Larson in a "Times-Picayune" book review.
Susan Larson
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
H.L. Mencken
The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her.
Henry James
The fickleness of the woman I love is equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
George Bernard Shaw
Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind," Jane intoned. "Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head.
Orson Scott Card
Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
H.L. Mencken
The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.
George Orwell