Quotes by Critics - Page 33

All dreams. If there was love or pity for him, it was only in his dreams.
Orson Scott Card
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
H.L. Mencken
But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.
George Orwell
Poisons pain you Rivers are damp Acid stains you And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful Nooses give Gas smells awful You might as well live.
Dorothy Parker
Why, that dog is practically a Phi Beta Kappa. She can sit up and beg, and she can give her paw -- I don't say she will but she can.
Dorothy Parker
I believe in the discipline of silence and could talk for hours about it.
George Bernard Shaw
It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.
George Bernard Shaw
Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.
Kingsley Amis
I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone.
Ford Madox Ford
We live in that grave, in those clothes, in the pressure between nothing and everything, we live by perpetual movement from place to place but we want oh we so much want to escape to say it all to come home at last to the right place our rightful place our rightful space. As if that was possible.
Gabriel Josipovici
We love in others what we lack ourselves and would be everything but what we are.
R. H. Stoddard
Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Take a winter as you find him and he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow with no nonsense in him: and tolerating none in you which is a great comfort in the long run.
James Russell Lowell
There are rules to everything, even if nobody made them up, even if nobody calls it a game. And if you want things to work out well, it's best to know the rules and only break them if you're playing a different game and following those rules.
Orson Scott Card
It seems to me that my whole life I've been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. And the first person I had to rescue was myself.
John Leonard
Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity, and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.
George Bernard Shaw
The English have an extraordinary ability for flying into a great calm.
Alexander Woollcott
Fabre stood up. He placed his fingertips on d‘Anton’s temples. “Put your fingers here,” he said. “Feel the resonance. Put them here, and here.” He jabbed at d’Anton’s face: below the cheekbones, at the side of his jaw. “I’ll teach you like an actor,” he said. “This city is our stage.”Camille said: “Book of Ezekiel. ‘This city is the cauldron, and we the flesh’ ...”Fabre turned. “This stutter,” he said. “You don’t have to do it.” Camille put his hands over his eyes. “Leave me alone,” he said. “Even you.” Fabre’s face was incandescent. “Even you, I am going to teach.” He leapt forward, wrenched Camille upright in his chair. He took him by the shoulders and shook him. “You’re going to talk properly,” Fabre said. “Even if it kills one of us.” Camille put his hands protectively over his head. Fabre continued to perpetrate violence; d’Anton was too tired to intervene.
Hilary Mantel
It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters.
George Orwell
Race relations never improve in war time; they always worsen. And it is when the boys come home the Ku Klux Klans are organized. I believe with George Schuyler that the only really feasible way to improve the general situation of the American Negro is to convince more and more whites that he is, as men go in this world, a decent fellow, and that amicable living with him is not only possible but desirable. Every threat of mass political pressure, every appeal to political mountebanks, only alarms the white brother, and so postpones the day of reasonable justice.
H.L. Mencken
When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. I didn't want to be a failure so I did ten times more work.
George Bernard Shaw
Every reading is a misreading.
Phyllis Rose
The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parents' first duty.
George Bernard Shaw
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia: To mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
H.L. Mencken
I know I'm a Third, I know it, if you want I'll go away so you don't have to be embarrassed in front of everybody, I'm sorry I lost the monitor and now you have three kids and no obvious explanation, so inconvenient for you, I'm sorry sorry sorry.
Orson Scott Card
As a matter of fact, when it comes to seeing, men display two tendencies: they see what they wish to see, what is useful to them, what is agreeable. The second is the tendency toward inhibition; they do not see what they do not wish to see, what is useless to them, or disagreeable.
Rémy de Gourmont
We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.
George Bernard Shaw
Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.
Orson Scott Card
[No single] explanation will ever contain the final answer for all time, for all hearers. There is always, ALWAYS more to learn.
Orson Scott Card
Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.
William Dean Howells
A not-too-distant explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in the next room the class of 1964 wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this happens I find myself thinking, "Is it possible that human beings can continue with this lunacy very much longer?" You know the answer, of course.
George Orwell
What it means to be a ‘better person’, then, must be concrete and practical — that is to say, concerned with people’s political situations as a whole — rather than narrowly abstract, concerned only with the immediate interpersonal relations which can be abstracted from this concrete whole. It must be a question of political and not only of ‘moral’ argument: that is to say, it must be genuine moral argument, which sees the relations between individual qualities and values and our whole material conditions of existence. Political argument is not an alternative to moral preoccupations: it is those preoccupations taken seriously in their full implications.
Terry Eagleton
You are certainly unique. Everyone is unique. Nobody has ever suffered quite like you before because nobody has ever been you before.
Robertson Davies
Cats and monkeys - monkeys and cats - all human life is there.
Henry James
Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought.
William Hazlitt
The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed.
George Orwell
The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.
Orson Scott Card
The unique thing about Margaret Rutherford is that she can act with her chin alone. Among its many moods I especially cherish the chin commanding the chin in doubt and the chin at bay.
Kenneth Tynan
There was never a place for her in the ranks of the terrible slow army of the cautious. She ran ahead where there were no paths.
Dorothy Parker
If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentleman he may pronounce as he pleases.
George Bernard Shaw
Lips that taste of tears they say are the best for kissing.
Dorothy Parker
A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
Hilary Mantel
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Randall Jarrell
How then find the courage for action?... By accepting the human condition more simply and candidly by dreading troubles less calculating less hoping more.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
So the I.F. is spying on Earth.""Just as a mother spies on her children at play in the yard.""Good to know you're looking out for us, Mummy.
Orson Scott Card
Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.
George Orwell
One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
George Orwell
Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.
George Bernard Shaw
I feel that there has to be a purpose to what we do. If there was no hope at all, we should just sleep or drink and wait for death. But we don’t want to do that. And why? I think something tells us that we should struggle. We don’t really know why we should struggle, but we do, because we think it’s better than sitting down and waiting for calamity.
Chinua Achebe
Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.
Joseph Wood Krutch
She’s the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She’s the self-made girl!(…)Well, to begin with, the self-made girl’s a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn’t self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.
Henry James
Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life - the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top-storey windows, and the like.
George Orwell
He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.
Joyce Carol Oates
O.K. I'm running out of appetite. Let this swirl— a bit like Crab Nebula— do for now.
Charles Olson
He believes, but he does not believe: the impossibility of believing is the impossibility which he accepts most reluctantly, but still it is there with the other impossibilities of this world which is too full of weeping for a child to understand.
Edmund Wilson
But what I knew then was that nobody-- not even my mother-- was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself on the surface.
Robertson Davies
The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labour. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, and its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact."Julia? Are you awake? There is truth, and there is untruth. To be in a minority of one doesn't make you mad.
George Orwell
Really to believe in human nature while striving to know the thousand forces that warp it from its ideal development-to call for and expect much from men and women, and not to be disappointed and embittered if they fall short- to try to do good with people rather than to them- this is my religion on its human side. And if God exists, I think that he must be in the warm sun, in the kindly actions of the people we know and read of, in the beautiful things of art and nature, and in the closeness of friendships.
Randolph Bourne
The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?
George Orwell
Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life
Joyce Carol Oates