Quotes by Critics - Page 29

Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.
William H. Gass
Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.
Dorothy Parker
Why did the sun rise this morningIt's not naturalI don't want to see the lightIt's not time to close the casketOr say Kaddish for my sonI've already buried two fathersWith a mother to comeIsn't that enough Lord who wants usTo exalt and santify HimI don't want to wear the mourner's ribbonOr wake up crying every morningFor God knows how longI don't want to tuck my son into the groundAs if we were putting him to bedFor the last timeClose the prayer book I will not pretendThat God brings peace upon usAnd upon all IsraelI don't want to hear anyoneScolding me from her wheelchairBecause I'm crying too hardI'm not worried about a heart attackNothingnessYou've already broken my heartI will not forgive youSun of emptinessSky of blank cloudsI will not forgive youIndifferent GodUntil you give back my son
Edward Hirsch
You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard but by attacking and getting well-hammered yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.
H.L. Mencken
Because nothing between human beings is uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.
Joyce Carol Oates
Since he had given up men he had taken up geography. He visited a new sight or a new neighborhood nearly every weekend.
Caleb Crain
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing they marry later. For another thing they die earlier.
H.L. Mencken
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of polities'. All issues are political issues.
George Orwell
I know, you've been here a year, you think these people are normal. Well, they're not. WE'RE not. I look in the library, I call up books on my desk. Old ones, because they won't let us have anything new, but I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. Children aren't in armies, they aren't COMMANDERS, they don't rule over forty other kids, it's more than anybody can take and not get crazy.
Orson Scott Card
It's the quality of harmony, sir. The quality of being in harmony with you own soul. God having given you your own soul you are then in harmony with Heaven.
Ford Madox Ford
It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentise into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial individuals, requiring no police, no army, no guardians of morality, and no government. The old Deity being dead and dethroned, Humankind would come at last into power.
Joyce Carol Oates
You don't want to have any pity on these here tramps – scum, they are. You don't want to judge them by the same standards as men like you and me. They're scum, just scum.' It was interesting to see the subtle way in which he disassociated himself from 'these here tramps'. He had been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. I imagine there are quite a lot of tramps who thank God they are not tramps. They are like the trippers who say such cutting things about trippers.
George Orwell
Home is anywhere that you know all your friends and all your enemies.
Orson Scott Card
The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people and greatly assists the circulation of their blood.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.
V.S. Pritchett
The contemporary art world is what Tom Wolfe would call a "statusphere." It's structured around nebulous and often contradictory hierarchies of fame, credibility, imagined historical importance, institutional affliction, perceived intelligence, wealth, and attribution such as the size of one's art collection.
Sarah Thornton
I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! You didn't want me, you bastards, you wanted Peter, but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!
Orson Scott Card
It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.
George Orwell
he writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated lo neliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.
Renata Adler
Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love- you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you're over. You've caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. 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
But I cant stand saying one thing when everyone knows I mean another. Whats the use in such hypocrisy? If people arrange the world that way for women, theres no good pretending it’s arranged the other way...
George Bernard Shaw
A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.
Orson Scott Card
A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, CRIMESTOP. CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.
George Orwell
It's called civilization. Women invented it, and every time you men blow it all to bits, we just invent it again.
Orson Scott Card
He was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy.
Henry James
In his autobiography Stravinsky relates that the first music he remembers was made by a peasant, working his hand in his armpit to produce a rhytmic farting.
Craig Raine
A wet autumn morning, a garbage truck clattering down the street. The first snowfall of the season, blossom sized flakes falling languidly and melting on teh ground, a premature snow fall delicate as lace, rapidly melting.
Joyce Carol Oates
Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
John Updike
The first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western Canada.
T.E. Hulme
There are two things to aim at in life: first to get what you want and after that to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.
Logan Pearsall Smith
The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.
Renata Adler
On the whole, we treat the Devil shamefully, and the worse we treat Him the more He laughs at us.
Robertson Davies
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflection of the voice; at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They need only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it.
George Orwell
They sicken of calm who know the storm.
Dorothy Parker
Must I at length the Sword of Justice draw?Oh curst Effects of necessary Law!How ill my Fear they by my Mercy scan,Beware the Fury of a Patient Man.
John Dryden
The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and poetry unite with Satan in their determination not to serve. Any end is higher than utility, when ends are up.
William H. Gass
I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares.
Orson Scott Card
The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist.
Richard Davenport-Hines
These are open secrets, so to speak. Of the kind we dare not articulate, for fear of wounding those close to us.
Joyce Carol Oates
I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you.
George Bernard Shaw
The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
Randall Jarrell
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
No man can be satisfied with his attainment although he may be satisfied with his circumstances.
Frank Swinnerton
Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.
George Orwell
No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients-- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.
George Orwell
This is a little parable about cities and genres; how, while some of them lose their imaginative centrality, others take their place.
Amit Chaudhuri
And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?
John Updike
He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve.
George Orwell
Answers I kept my answers small and kept them near;Big questions bruised my mind but still I letSmall answers be a bullwark to my fear.The huge abstractions I kept from the light;Small things I handled and caressed and loved.I let the stars assume the whole of night.But the big answers clamoured to be moved Into my life. Their great audacityShouted to be acknowledged and believed.Even when all small answers build up toProtection of my spirit, still I hearBig answers striving for their overthrow.And all the great conclusions coming near
Edith Sitwell
The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different.
George Orwell
If you can cheat, so can I. I won't let you beat me unfairly - I'll beat you unfairly first.
Orson Scott Card
When a man admits guilt we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise the law courts would never function.
Hilary Mantel
For the rest, she grew used to the life that she was leading - used to the enormous sleepless nights, the cold, the dirt, the boredom, and the horrible communism of the Square. After a day or two she had ceased to feel even a flicker of surprise at her situation. She had come, like everyone about her, to accept this monstrous existence almost as though it were normal. The dazed, witless feeling that she had known on the way to the hopfields had come back upon her more strongly than before. It is the common effect of sleeplessness and still more of exposure. To live continuously in the open air, never going under a roof for more than an hour or two, blurs your perceptions like a strong light glaring in your eyes or a noise drumming in your ears. You act and plan and suffer, and yet all the while it is as though everything were a little out of focus, a little unreal. The world, inner and outer, grows dimmer till it reaches almost the vagueness of a dream.
George Orwell
This revolution - will it be a living?''We must hope so. Look, I have to go, I'm visiting a client. He's going to be hanged tomorrow.''Is that usual?''Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases.
Hilary Mantel
How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?”Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said.“Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?...
George Orwell
There are few sorrows however poignant in which a good income is of no avail.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Mind led bodyto the edge of the precipice.They stared in desireat the naked abyss.If you love me, said mind,take that step into silence.If you love me, said body,turn and exist.
Anne Stevenson
He was clearly not the murderer whom Hawksmoor was seeking, but it was generally the innocent who confessed: in the course of many enquiries, Hawksmoor had come across those who accused themselves of crimes which they had not committed and who demanded to be taken away before they could do more harm. He was acquainted with such people and recognised them at once - although they were noticeable, perhaps, only for a slight twitch in the eye or the awkward gait with which they moved through the world. And they inhabited small rooms to which Hawksmoor would sometimes be called: rooms with a bed and a chair but nothing besides, rooms where they shut the door and began talking out loud, rooms where they sat all evening and waited for the night, rooms where they experienced blind panic and then rage as they stared at their lives. And sometimes when he saw such people Hawksmoor thought, this is what I will become, I will be like them because I deserve to be like them, and only the smallest accident separates me from them now.
Peter Ackroyd
None are completely wretched but those who are without hope and few are reduced so low as that.
William Hazlitt