Quotes by Critics - Page 32

A poem is a ‘line’ between any two points in creation.
Charles Olson
What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us!
James Russell Lowell
It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.
Dorothy Parker
Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.
Carolyn See
Certain American uses of deconstruction, Derrida has observed, work to ensure ‘an institutional closure’ which serves the dominant political and economic interests of American society. Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new techniques of reading: deconstruction is for him an ultimately political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole system of political structures and social institutions, maintains its force. He is not seeking, absurdly, to deny the existence of relatively determinate truths, meanings, identities, intentions, historical continuities; he is seeking rather to see such things as the effects of a wider and deeper history of language, of the unconscious, of social institutions and practices.
Terry Eagleton
We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
George Bernard Shaw
It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder.
George Orwell
Never take another human being to the third life, because we don't know how to go.
Orson Scott Card
I grew up in an atmosphere tinged with militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within the sound of bugles. To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during ‘God save the King’. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.
George Orwell
Science never solves a problem without creating ten more
George Bernard Shaw
DYER. (Sits down) There was nothing that I recall save that the Sunne was a Round flat shining Disc and the Thunder was a Noise from a Drum or a Pan.VANNBRUGGHE. (Aside) What a Child is this! (To Dyer) These are only our Devices, and are like the Paint of our Painted Age.DYER. But in Meditation the Sunne is a vast and glorious Body, and Thunder is the most forcible and terrible Phaenomenon: it is not to be mocked, for the highest Passion is Terrour.
Peter Ackroyd
There's only one way of escaping trouble; and that's killing things." Henry Higgins, Act V, Pygmalion
George Bernard Shaw
...this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.
Hilary Mantel
....And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time
George Orwell
A minor request," said Mazer. "Let's not refer to it as the training cage. 'Training' sounds laborious and regimented. Soldiers groan at the word. These men joined the IF to fight, sir. Let's call it the Battle Room.
Orson Scott Card
The loneliness of difference, the loneliness of undesirability, the loneliness of not being admitted into the magic circles of connection and acceptance – the social and professional groupings, the embracing arms.
Olivia Laing
A good poet is someone who manages in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning five or six times.
Randall Jarrell
It is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box
George Orwell
Kindness is goodness hidden in the heartMore often than declared in speech.
William Kean Seymour
A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself.
George Bernard Shaw
1776: A declaration of the Parlement of Paris:The first rule of justice is to conserve for each individual that which belongs to him. This is a fundamental rule of natural law, human rights and civil government; a rule which consists not only in maintaining the rights of property, but also those rights vested in the individual and derived from prerogatives of birth and social position.
Hilary Mantel
Men are the only animals that devote themselves day in and day out to making one another unhappy.
H.L. Mencken
It did not last: the Devil howling 'Ho, Let Einstein be,' restored the status quo.
John Collings Squire
The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
V.S. Pritchett
What appears most disquieting to me in isolation is the dilemma of how to use time. There is either too much or too little of it; we either live inside painfully contracting horizons, or feel ourselves isolated in the vastness of space. I seem to have lived with the palm of my hand balanced on the tip of a knife, writing what in theory I would call the Preface to a Future Book. And the relation of time to creation should always appear like that, a ratio that describes the fullness of energy brought to a particular stage of one's life, so that each work is a preface to a stage at which one has still to arrive, the logical extension of which is death. I live for the blaze of metaphor that unites incongruities. The red wine-stain on my page is like an intoxicant to the dance of words. It is a little ritual I undertake, this sprinkling of wine-spots on paper.
Jeremy Reed
No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence.
Malcolm Cowley
But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.
George Bernard Shaw
Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it— say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.
Sontag
Women, of their nature, crave for liberty; they will not be ordered around like servants.
Peter Ackroyd
It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play — the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life — its facility, its use.
William H. Gass
Another anti-theoretical stratagem is to claim that in order to launch some fundamental critique of our culture, we would need to be standing at some Archimedean point beyond it. What this fails to see is that reflecting critically on our situation is part of our situation. It is a feature of the peculiar way we belong to the world. It is not some impossible light-in-the-refrigerator attempt to scrutinize ourselves when we are not there. Curving back on ourselves is as natural to us as it is to cosmic space or a wave of the sea. It does not entail jumping out of our own skin. Without such self-monitoring we would not have survived as a species.
Terry Eagleton
Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.
Hilary Mantel
There is a camaraderie that grows up among those who work with old books and old papers, largely, I suspect, because we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward.
Peter Ackroyd
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?
George Orwell
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...
Orson Scott Card
I hate writing, I love having written.
Dorothy Parker
It is not perhaps a question of truthfulness; it is rather a natural incapacity to think for herself, to take cognizance of herself in her own brain, and not in the eyes and in the lips of others; even when the ingenuously write into little secret diaries, women think of the unknown god reading--perhaps--over their shoulders. With a similar nature, a woman, to be placed in the first ranks of men, would require even higher genius than that of the highest man; that is why, if the conspicuous works of men themselves, the finest works of women are always inferior to the worth of the women who produced them.
Rémy de Gourmont
When people shake their heads because we are living in a restless age ask them how they would like to life in a stationary one and do without change.
George Bernard Shaw
As a general thing people marry most happily with their own kind. The trouble lies in the fact that people usually marry at an age when they do not really know what their own kind is.
Robertson Davies
We like to think of individuals as unique. Yet if this is true of everyone, then we all share the same quality, namely our uniqueness. What we have in common is the fact that we are all uncommon. Everybody is special, which means that nobody is. The truth, however, is that human beings are uncommon only up to a point. There are no qualities that are peculiar to one person alone. Regrettably, there could not be a world in which only one individual was irascible, vindictive or lethally aggressive. This is because human beings are not fundamentally all that different from each other, a truth postmodernists are reluctant to concede. We share an enormous amount in common simply by virtue of being human, and this is revealed by the vocabularies we have for discussing human character. We even share the social processes by which we come to individuate ourselves.
Terry Eagleton
The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy ... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?
Henry James
And remember also that in fighting against man we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices.
George Orwell
Why do you talk all the time?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question, but she cocked her head on one side and considered it carefully.“I think it’s ’cause I don’t know any big words, like you and Mummy,” she said, just in time to pull me out of my magazine again, “so I have to use lots and lots of little ones.
Theodore Sturgeon
All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.
George Orwell
Good heavens of what uncostly material is our earthly happiness composed ... if we only knew it. What incomes have we not had from a flower and how unfailing are the dividends of the seasons.
James Russell Lowell
Man can no more see the world than a fish can see the river bank.
Rémy de Gourmont
Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot.
John Updike
Ender began to eat, slowly and carefully, pretending not to notice he was the center of attention.
Orson Scott Card
The art of government is the organization of idolatry.
George Bernard Shaw
I aim to make the fiction flexible so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them. Otherwise I don’t see the point. Nobody seems to understand that. Nobody seems to share my approach to historical fiction. I suppose if I have a maxim, it is that there isn’t any necessary conflict between good history and good drama.
Hilary Mantel
Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty?
Olivia Laing
A womanly occupation means, practically, an occupation that a man disdains.
George Gissing
When there is no peril in the fight, there is no glory in the triumph.
Al Álvarez
Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
John Updike
The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.
Joseph Wood Krutch
A garden is never finished. In that sense it is like the human world and all human undertakings.
Karel Čapek
Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the arm-chair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity.
George Orwell
Rules, whether they govern sexual morality or financial probity, regardless of whether they are justifiable or undesirable, always provoke bold recalcitrants to devise clever, defiant ways to breach them.
Richard Davenport-Hines
Welcome, thou kind deceiver!Thou best of thieves: who, with an easy key,Dost open life, and, unperceived by us,Even steal us from ourselves.
John Dryden
Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
V.S. Pritchett