Quotes by Critics - Page 31

Although it was only six o'clock, the night was already dark. The fog, made thicker by its proximity to the Seine, blurred every detail with its ragged veils, punctured at various distances by the reddish glow of lanterns and bars of light escaping from illuminated windows. The road was soaked with rain and glittered under the street-lamps, like a lake reflecting strings of lights. A bitter wind, heavy with icy particles, whipped at my face, its howling forming the high notes of a symphony whose bass was played by swollen waves crashing into the piers of the bridges below. The evening lacked none of winter's rough poetry.
Théophile Gautier
Some mysterious revenge of nature has seen to it that no poem in praise of drink or tobacco (or snuff, if any) can succeed.
Kingsley Amis
On opening night, standing under the Rogers's marquee, [Lin] realized that if Eliza's struggle was the element of Hamilton's story that had inspired him the most, then the show itself was a part of her legacy.
Jeremy McCarter
The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.
Terry Eagleton
You are still young enough to think that torment of the spirit is a splendid thing, a sign of a superior nature. But you are no longer a young man; you are a youngish middle aged man, and it is time you found out that these spiritual athletics do not lead to wisdom.
Robertson Davies
Mere grimness is as easy as grinning; but it requires something to put a handsome face on a story. Narratives become of suspicious merit in proportion as they lean to Newgate-like offenses, particularly of blood and wounds...
Leigh Hunt
These children had never looked death in the face and then chosen to live anyway.
Orson Scott Card
Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no 'morality'. For what's 'morality' but a leash around the neck? A noose? What's 'morality' but what other people want you to do, for their own, selfish, unstated purposes?
Joyce Carol Oates
Counting on each other became automatic. When I found a sweater in Texas I wanted, I learned to buy two, which was easier than seeing the look of disappointment on Caroline's face when I returned home with only one. When she went out from the boathouse on a windy day, she gave me her schedule in advance, which assuaged her worst-case scenario of flipping the boat, being hit on the head by an oar, and leaving Lucille stranded at home. I still have my set of keys to her house, to locks and doors that no longer exist, and I keep them in my glove compartment, where they have been moved from one car to another in the past couple of years. Someday I will throw them in the Charles, where I lost the seat to her boat and so much else.
Gail Caldwell
If we have any role at all, I think it’s the role of optimism, not blind or stupid optimism, but the kind which is meaningful, one that is rather close to that notion of the world which is not perfect, but which can be improved. In other words, we don’t just sit and hope that things will work out; we have a role to play to make that come about.
Chinua Achebe
If we seek the pleasures of love passion should be occasional and common sense continual.
Robertson Davies
Only when men are connected to large universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity.
Joyce Carol Oates
How often the fear of one evil leads into a worse.
Nicolas Bouleau-Despreaux
But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life
Renata Adler
You don't learn to hold your own by standing on guard but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
For purposes of action nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought combined with energy of will.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the law and sentenced a criminal to death. And now he is going to pay for it.
Hilary Mantel
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
George Bernard Shaw
Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.
Joyce Carol Oates
It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.
George Bernard Shaw
When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone’s thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a “case” with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends.
George Orwell
I don't advise. You mutn't give any weight to what I say, except in so far as your own judgment approves it.
George Gissing
I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
Henry James
You made them hate me." Said Ender"So? What will you do about it? Crawl in a corner? Start kissing their little backsides so they'll love you again? There's only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore you. I told them you were the best. Now you damn well better be." -Graff
Orson Scott Card
A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry.
Robert Pinsky
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
George Orwell
Science is the systematic classification of experience.
George Henry Lewes
He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.'White to play and mate in two moves.'Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.
George Orwell
For the first time in his life, a teacher was pointing out things that Ender had not already seen for himself. For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.
Orson Scott Card
Every new book we read in our brief and busy lives means that a classic is left unread.
B.R. Myers
For till the thunder and trumpet be,Soul may divide from body, but not weOne from another
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Of course you would, Mitt," Reagan said. "Well, I’m glad we understand each other, and I think your father would be proud of you being in his old spot, and I want you to know that when I’m choosing my Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, your resumé will be on the very top of the pile. It’s been great chatting with you but you know, I have to find a vice presidential candidate, and soon.”“Ha, ha, ha, ah it’s been great chatting with you, too, Mr. President, and—”Reagan cocked his head slightly, smiled, and caught the eye of a minion; a moment later Romney had been deposited outside the door like a discarded room service tray, having barely had time to shift from ha, ha, ha back to ah…ah…
John Barnes
With "gay marriage," the last shreds of meaning will be stripped away from marriage, with homosexuals finishing what faithless, selfish heterosexuals have begun.
Orson Scott Card
An election is a moral horror as bad as a battle except for the blood a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
George Bernard Shaw
Our hearts were drunk with a beauty our eyes could never see.
George W. Russell
Where unwilling dies the rose Buds the new another year.
Dorothy Parker
When the bishop farted we were amused to hear about it. Should the ploughboy find treasure we must be told. But when the ploughboy farts... er... keep it to yourself.
Kingsley Amis
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 ought to be.
William Hazlitt
I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas into these articles. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous, subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blashphemous, and demoralizing subject. Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and any one who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages.
George Bernard Shaw
The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t—whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
John Updike
Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway.
Henry James
It happened to some people, that obsession with throwing their clothes off at an age when it would be best to keep them on.
Philip Hensher
The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides never decides.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.
George Bernard Shaw
Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!
George Bernard Shaw
When I had to leave she kissed me on both cheeks - a thing she had never done before - and said, 'There's just one thing to remember; whatever happens, it does no good to be afraid.' So I promised not to be afraid, and may even have been a fool enough to think I could keep my promise.
Robertson Davies
England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.
George Orwell
Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
John Updike
Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized by a madness which forces them to commit the very acts which makes it certain that what they dread shall happen.
Dame Rebecca West
And speaking of options ,these kids [the ones who attend elite universities] have all been told that theirs are limitless. Once you commit to something, though, that ceases to be true. A former student sent me an essay he wrote, a few years after college, called "The Paradox of Potential." Yale students, he said, are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation.
William Deresiewicz
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
H.L. Mencken
This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.
Ezra Pound
A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.
George Orwell
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. . . . And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money. I Corinthians xiii (adapted)
George Orwell
Good-nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all the virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition.
William Hazlitt
In Rome the statues, in Paris the paintings, and in Prague the buildings suggest that pleasure can be an education.
Caleb Crain
I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.
George Bernard Shaw
A critic is a legless man who teaches running.
Channing Pollock
For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life trying to impress the 'natives,' and so in every crisis he has got to do what the 'natives' expect of him... A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.
George Orwell
Then, idly scratching his nose, he walks to the bookcase in the living room and stoops before a set of drab brown Victorian volumes gathering dust on the second shelf from the bottom.How amusing, he thinks, as he withdraws one of them-amusing that a key to dark and ancient rites should survive in such innocuous-looking form.A young fool like Freirs would probably refuse to believe it. Like the rest of his doomed kind, he'd probably expect such lore to be found only in ancient leather-bound tomes with gothic lettering and portentously sinister titles. He'd search for it in mysterious old trunks and private vaults, in the "restricted" sections of libraries, in intricately carved wood chests with secret compartments.But there are no real secrets, the Old One knows. Secrets are ultimately too hard to conceal. The keys to the rites that will transform the world are neither hidden nor rare nor expensive. They are available to anyone. You can find them on the paperback racks or in any second-hand bookshop.
T.E.D. Klein