Quotes by Critics - Page 30

Fortunately, our colleges and universities are fully cognizant of the problems I have been delineating and take concerted action to address them. Curricula are designed to give coherence to the educational experience and to challenge students to develop a strong degree of moral awareness. Professors, deeply involved with the enterprise of undergraduate instruction, are committed to their students' intellectual growth and insist on maintaining the highest standards of academic rigor. Career services keep themselves informed about the broad range of postgraduate options and make a point of steering students away from conventional choices. A policy of noncooperation with U.S. News has taken hold, depriving the magazine of the data requisite to calculate its rankings. Rather than squandering money on luxurious amenities and exorbitant administrative salaries, schools have rededicated themselves to their core missions of teaching and the liberal arts. I'm kidding, of course.
William Deresiewicz
When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: If one of us has to be destroyed, let's make damn sure we're the ones alive at the end.
Orson Scott Card
...the Conservative party found him an embarrassment because he was apt to criticize the party leader in public, the Liberals naturally wanted to defeat him, and the newspapers were out to get him. It was a dreadful campaign on his part, for he lost his head, bullied his electors when he should have wooed them, and got into a wrangle with a large newspaper, which he threatened to sue for libel. He was defeated on election day so decisively that it was obviously a personal rather than a political rejection.
Robertson Davies
Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented the sword.
Walter Kirn
Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?O'Brien: Of course he exists.Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me?O'Brien: You do not exist.
George Orwell
Oh, people get used to so many things," said Vadesh, "if only they give them selves a chance.
Orson Scott Card
One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived.
Paul Bourget
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
... Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism....
Terry Eagleton
I shudder at the thought of men....I'm due to fall in love again
Dorothy Parker
Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.
Richard Davenport-Hines
The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.
Dorothy Parker
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
George Orwell
This visit has compacted the court's quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the town's walls. The travelers have become as intimate with each other as cards in a pack: contiguous, but their paper eyes blind.
Hilary Mantel
What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?
Logan Pearsall Smith
Still, I think Hardy's the most likely person in this theater to be snapped up by the studios." "But he can't act!" Norman protested. "Sure he can't act. Neither can Nelson Eddy, and he makes a living." "But Eddy can sing." "All right. So Hardy can't sing either. That makes him twice as attractive.
Anthony Boucher
He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.
John Updike
On his thirteenth birthday he had seen a film in which the central character was a painter who, unable to sell his work, grew cold and hungry as he went from one unsuccessful interview to the next; eventually he had become a vagrant, sleeping in the streets of the city where once he had walked in hope. Hawksmoor left the cinema in a mood of profound, terrified apprehension and, from that time, he was filled with a sense of time passing and with the fear that he might be left discarded on its banks. The fear had not left him, although now he could no longer remember from where it came: he looked back on his earlier life without curiosity, since it seemed to lack intrinsic interest, and when he looked forward he saw the same steady attainment of goals without any joy in their attainment. For him, the state of happiness was simply the state of not suffering and, if he cared for anything, it was for oblivion.
Peter Ackroyd
Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.
George Bernard Shaw
I thought speakers didn't believe in sin," said a sullen boy.Andrew smiled. "You believe in sin, Styrka, and you do things because of that belief. So sin is real in you, and knowing you, this speaker must believe in sin.
Orson Scott Card
He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him, and say, 'You prick.
Hilary Mantel
If literature matters today, it is chiefly because it seems to many conventional critics one of the few remaining places where, in a divided, fragmented world, a sense of universal value may still be incarnate; and where, in a sordidly material world, a rare glimpse of transcendence can still be attained.
Terry Eagleton
That which is repeated too often becomes insipid and tedious.
Nicolas Boileau
The image of the "presence," whatever it was, waiting there for him to go--this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short--he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.
Henry James
Mitt Romney's first interview with Zombie Reagan: Mitt Romney came in with cheerful assurance, because he wasn’t capable of anything else. “Let me first welcome you back to this side of the veil, Mr. President.”“Yeah, Mitt, it’s good to see you looking so well. Your father says hello, and he wanted me to add specially that whatever unfortunate negative things you might remember him saying to you when you were a kid, he always tried to tell you the truth and he hopes you’ve used it to improve, and he understands that even with the help of those comments, it might just not have been in you to improve. He wants you to remember he still loves you no matter what you’ve become, or even if you haven’t chosen to become any one thing in particular.”“That’s very kind. I miss my dad even now.”“Oh, so do I. I remember George as always that kind of guy, he had your back, whenever you’d think to watch your back, you’d find him somewhere around there, ready for action with that knife already drawn.
John Barnes
Self-denial is not a virtue it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
George Bernard Shaw
A child cannot pay for its mother's milk
Chinua Achebe
...but there were four things I taught Walter to consider: 1) That it was Cain who built the first City, 2) That there is a true Science in the World called Scientia Umbrarum which, as to the publick teaching of it, has been suppressed but which the proper Artificer must comprehend, 3) That Architecture aims at Eternity and must contain the Eternal Powers: not only our Altars and Sacrifices, but the Forms of our Temples, must be mysticall, 4) That the miseries (If the present Life, and the Barbarities of Mankind, the fatall disadvantages we are all under and the Hazard we run of being eternally Undone, lead the True Architect not to Harmony or to Rationall Beauty but to quite another Game. Why, do we not believe the very Infants to be the Heirs of Hell and Children of the Devil as soon as they are disclos'd to the World? I declare that I build my Churches firmly on this Dunghil Earth and with a full Conception of Degenerated Nature. I have only room to add: there is a mad-drunken Catch, Hey ho! The Devil is dead! If that be true, I have been in the wrong Suit all my Life.
Peter Ackroyd
This mundus tenebrosus, this shaddowy world of Mankind, is sunk into Night; there is not a Field without its Spirits, nor a City without its Daemons, and the Lunaticks speak Prophesies while the Wise men fall into the Pitte.
Peter Ackroyd
The maid found a handkerchief of hers, under the bed in which she had died. A ring that had been missing turned up in his own writing desk. A tradesman arrived with fabric she had ordered three weeks ago. Each day, some further evidence of a task half finished, a scheme incomplete. He found a novel, with her place marked.And this is it.
Hilary Mantel
It came at last."'Dr. Graham, tell me,' she asked tremulously, 'do you believe that prayers - wicked unreasonable prayers - are granted?'He helped himself to another slice of bread-and-butter before answering. 'Well-' he said slowly, 'it seems hard to believe that every fool who has a voice to pray with and a brain to conceive idiotic requests should be permitted to interfere with the economy of the universe. As a rule, if people were long-sighted enough to foresee the result of their petitions, I fancy very few of us would venture to interfere.' ("The Story of A Ghost")
Violet Hunt
No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.
Orson Scott Card
Liberal - a power worshipper without power.
George Orwell
When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.
William H. Gass
And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it’s inaudible.
Joyce Carol Oates
It is well there is no one without fault for he would not have a friend in the world. He would seem to belong to a different species.
William Hazlitt
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?
George Orwell
All foreign food is doomed to be consumed in India not so much by Indians as by a voracious Indian sensibility, which demands infinite versions of Indian food, and is unmoved by difference.
Amit Chaudhuri
Let us be of good cheer remembering that misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.
James Russell Lowell
The dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its meaningless-ness.
Martin Esslin
Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of ’94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.
Hilary Mantel
And I was a Child again, watching the bright World. But the Spell broke when at this Juncture some Gallants jumped from the Pitt onto the Stage and behaved as so many Merry-Andrews among the Actors, which reduced all to Confusion. I laugh'd with them also, for I like to make Merry among the Fallen and there is pleasure to be had in the Observation of the Deformity of Things. Thus when the Play resumed after the Disturbance, it was only to excite my Ridicule with its painted Fictions, wicked Hypocrisies and villainous Customs, all depicted with a little pert Jingle of Words and a rambling kind of Mirth to make the Insipidnesse and Sterility pass. There was no pleasure in seeing it, and nothing to burden the Memory after: like a voluntarie before a Lesson it was absolutely forgotten, nothing to be remembered or repeated.
Peter Ackroyd
He woke up and fought another battle and won. Then he went to bed and slept again and dreamed again and then he woke up and won again and slept again and he hardly noticed when waking became sleeping. Nor did he care.
Orson Scott Card
A belief is not true because it is useful
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Liars are exhausting people.
Walter Kirn
Every person is responsible for all the good within the scope of his abilities and for no more.
Gail Hamilton
I wish you to believe whatever you think is true, at any and every cost.
William Dean Howells
Don't make fun of me!" Ender said. "I'm afraid I'm going crazy.
Orson Scott Card
Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest violence.
Lord Francis Jeffrey
To be beautiful, handsome, means that you possess a power which makes all smile upon and welcome you; that everybody is impressed in your favor and inclined to be of your opinion; that you have only to pass through a street or to show yourself at a balcony to make friends and to win mistresses from among those who look upon you. What a splendid, what a magnificent gift is that which spares you the need to be amiable in order to be loved, which relieves you of the need of being clever and ready to serve, which you must be if ugly, and enables you to dispense with the innumerable moral qualities which you must possess in order to make up for the lack of personal beauty.
Théophile Gautier
But the compulsive overachievement of today's elite college students - the sense that they need to keep running as fast as they can - is not the only thing that keeps them from forming the deeper relationships that might relieve their anguish. Something more insidious is operating, too: a resistance to vulnerability, a fear of looking like the only one who isn't capable of handling the pressure. These are young people who have always succeeded at everything, in part by projecting the confidence that they always will. Now, as they get to college, the stakes are higher and the competition fiercer. Everybody thinks that they are the only one who's suffering, so nobody says anything, so everybody suffers. Everyone feels like a fraud; everybody thinks that everybody else is smarter than they are.
William Deresiewicz
No real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.
William Deresiewicz
It's ugly, but is it art?
Randall Jarrell
How strange it (the earthquake) must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the way!
William Dean Howells
We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.
Henry James
I kicked, shouted an obscene word, got another faceful of goo for my troubles, and did the only thing left available to me. I started to laugh. This was a stupid way to die, all right. But also a god damned funny one.
Adam-Troy Castro
I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.
Orson Scott Card
To many people dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles.
John Mason Brown
Ah! I wish I had the courage to work for the debasement of my contemporaries. What good work it would be to defile their daughters: to insinuate something obscene into the infantile hands which caress each paternal beard and cheek; to poison them, even at the risk of perishing ourselves; to do as those Spanish monks did, who drank death in order that they might persuade the French rabble which had violated their monastery to do likewise.
Rémy de Gourmont
A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.
George Bernard Shaw