Quotes by Critics - Page 34

Never neglect the charms of narrative for the human heart.
Robertson Davies
Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!) Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace.
Leigh Hunt
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad hoc plot device.
David Langford
It is privilege of living to be ... acutely agonizingly conscious of the moment that is always present and always passing.
Marya Mannes
It will hurt." said Petra. "But let's make the most of what we have, and not let future pain ruin present happiness.
Orson Scott Card
Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.
Gail Caldwell
People don't like to talk about alcohol. They don't like to think about it, except in the most superficial of ways. They don't like to examine the damage it does and I don't blame them. I don't like it either. I know that desire for denial with every bone in my body: clavicle, sternum, femur and phalanx.
Olivia Laing
The dull pulse-like beat started at eleven o’clock at night. It was a new kind of music called ‘rap’. It baffled Ananda even more than disco. He had puzzled and puzzled over why people would want to listen and even move their bodies to an angry, insistent onrush of words – words that rhymed, apparently, but had no echo or afterlife. It was as if they were an extension of the body: never had words sounded so alarmingly physical, and pure physicality lacks empathy, it’s machine-like.
Amit Chaudhuri
Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.
George Bernard Shaw
I know at least what I am,' he simply went on; 'the other side of the medal's clear enough. I've not been edifying--I believe I'm thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I've followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods; it must have come to you again and again--in fact you've admitted to me as much--that I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous scandalous life. And you see what it has made of me.
Henry James
Rare and powerful harmonies exist,Shaping both scent and contour in a flower.Thus brilliance lies unseen by us until,Beneath the chisel, it blazes in the diamond.And thus do images of fleeting vision,Drifting above like cloud-forms in the sky,Once turned to stone live on from age to age,Held always in a faultless, polished phrase.("A Sonnet To Form")
Valery Bryusov
I believe that only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.
Storm Jameson
The stork is voiceless because there is really nothing to say.
Will Cuppy
In order not to make a liar out of Henry or Katherine, one or the other, the committee men think up circumstances in which the match may have been partly consummated, or somewhat consummated, and to do this they have to imagine every disaster and shame that can occur between a man and a woman alone in a room in the dark.
Hilary Mantel
All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
George Orwell
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
George Bernard Shaw
I am quite a wise old bird, but I am no desert hermit who can only prophesy when his guts are knotted with hunger. I am deep in the old man’s puzzle, trying to link the wisdom of the body with the wisdom of the spirit until the two are one.
Robertson Davies
The exotic and the erotic ideals go hand in hand, and this fact also contributes another proof of a more or less obvious truth - that is, that a love of the exotic is usually an imaginative projection of a sexual desire.
Mario Praz
So we fell asleep holding hands. If married couples got to do this all the time, shit if I could understand how there were ever divorces, or even fights.
John Barnes
A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set us a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific text-book, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact.
George Orwell
The people had once created the city. The city now created the people, or, more exactly, the people of Venice now identified themselves more in terms of the city. The private had become public.
Peter Ackroyd
It was strange that one couldn’t know in advance which places one was later going to wish to remember.
Caleb Crain
On Friday evening Martin and Mona went to the United Artists Theatre to see a film already being mentioned for the Academy award. It had three stars, ran a hundred and ten minutes, and bored them both to petrifaction. (In brief, the award was in the bag.)The Case of the Seven of Calvary
Anthony Boucher
Before he went away, he had heard all about the self-made girl, and there was something in the picture that strongly impressed him. She was possible doutbless only in America; American life had smoothed the way for her. She was not fast, nor emancipated, nor crude, nor loud, and there wasn’t in her, of necessity at least, a grain of the stuff of which the adventuress is made.She was simply very successful, and her success was entirely personal. She hadn’t been born with the silver spoon of social opportunity, she had grasped it by honest exertion. You knew her by many different signs, but chiefly, infallibly, by the appearance of her parents. It was her parents who told her story; you always saw how little her parents could have made her. Her attitude with regard to them might vary in different ways. As the great fact on her own side was that she had lifted herself from a lower social plane, done it all herself, and done it by the simple lever of her personality, it was naturally to be expected that she would leave the authors of her mere material being in the shade.(…)But the general characteristic of the self-made girl was that, though it was frequently understood that she was privately devoted to her kindred, she never attempted to impose them on society, and it was striking that, though in some of her manifestations a bore, she was at her worst less of a bore than they. They were almost always solemn and portentous, and they were for the most part of a deathly respectability. She wasn’t necessarily snobbish, unless it was snobbish to want the best. She didn’t cringe, she didn’t make herself smaller than she was, she took on the contrary a stand of her own and attracted things to herself.Naturally she was possible only in America, only in a country where whole ranges of competition and comparison were absent.
Henry James
The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should insist on the need to engage in a meaningful debate on the entire issue of the truth or falsity (or probability or improbability) of religious tenets, without being subject to accusations of impiety, immorality, impoliteness, or any of the other smokescreens used by the pious to deflect attention from the central issues at hand.
S.T. Joshi
(...) I could "talk fast" -- that's to say, without hesitating, stammering -- most of the time -- but there were categories of words, sentiments, I could never say, they'd have stuck in my throat. The embarrassment of it even whispering-teasing to Legs for instance 'Yeah you're my heart too!' or 'I love you' or 'I would die for you', nobody ever talked that way, mostly there was just my mother and me and we hardly talked at all.
Joyce Carol Oates
Many readers simply can't stomach fantasy. They immediately picture elves with broadswords or mighty-thewed barbarians with battle axes, seeking the bejeweled Coronet of Obeisance ... (But) the best fantasies pull aside the velvet curtain of mere appearance. ... In most instances, fantasy ultimately returns us to our own now re-enchanted world, reminding us that it is neither prosaic nor meaningless, and that how we live and what we do truly matters.
Michael Dirda
HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man?DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.
George Bernard Shaw
Because human nature never changes.
Orson Scott Card
The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should guard against the encroachment of religion in areas where it has no place, and in particular the control of education by religious authority. The attempts to ban the teaching of evolution or other scientific theories -- a feeble echo of medieval church tyranny and hostility to learning, but an echo nonetheless are serious threats to freedom of inquiry and should be vigorously combated.
S.T. Joshi
I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.
George Gissing
[B]y reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits us to explore the relations between the unconscious and human society. One way of describing his work is to say that he makes us recognize that the unconscious is not some kind of seething, tumultuous, private region ‘inside’ us, but an effect of our relations with one another. The unconscious is, so to speak, ‘outside’ rather than ‘within’ us — or rather it exists ‘between’ us, as our relationships do.
Terry Eagleton
It is up to us to decide what human means, and exactly how it is different from machine, and what tasks ought and ought not to be trusted to either species of symbol-processing system. But some decisions must be made soon, while the technology is still young. And the deciding must be shared by as many citizens as possible, not just the experts. In that sense, the most important factor in whether we will all see the dawn of a humane, sustainable world in the twenty-first century will be how we deal with these machines a few of us thought up and a lot of us will be using.
Howard Rheingold
The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
George Orwell
He draws a line under his conclusions. Says, 'Gregory, what should I do about the great worm?' 'Send a commission against it, sir,' the boy says. 'It must be put down.' He gives his son a long look. 'You do know it's Arthur Cobbler's tales?' Gregory gives him a long look back. 'Yes, I do know.' He sounds regretful. 'But it makes people so happy when I believe them.
Hilary Mantel
Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.
Orson Scott Card
Such subtle covenants shall be made, Till peace itself is war in masquerade.
John Dryden
All human things are subject to decay And when fate summons monarchs must obey.
John Dryden
Yes, its hard to write. But its harder not to.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
What else should you be? Human beings didn't evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing's the first thing we learned. And a good thing we did, or we'd be dead, and the tigers would own the earth.
Orson Scott Card
When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.
Steve Erickson
Wit is the only wall Between us and the dark.
Mark Van Doren
Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply to enjoy simply to think freely to risk life to be needed.
Storm Jameson
For I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood.
Hilary Mantel
As for wealth, we live in a civilization which piously denies that it is an end in itself, and treats it exactly this way in practice. One of the most powerful indictments of capitalism is that it compels us to invest most of our creative energies in matters which are in fact purely utilitarian. The means of life become the end. Life consists in laying the material infrastructure for living. It is astonishing that in the twenty-fi rst century, the material organization of life should bulk as large as it did in the Stone Age. The capital which might be devoted to releasing men and women, at least to some moderate degree, from the exigencies of labour is dedicated instead to the task of amassing more capital.
Terry Eagelton
Think of a ball of steel as large as the world, and a fly alighting on it once every million years. When the ball of steel is rubbed away by the friction, eternity will not even have begun.
David Lodge
I’ve always resented the word maturity, primarily, I think, because it is most often used as a club. If you do something that someone doesn’t like, you lack maturity, regardless of the actual merits of your action. Too, it seems to me that what is most often called maturity is nothing more than disengagement from life. If you meet life squarely, you are likely to make mistakes, do things you wish you hadn’t, say things you wish you could retract or phrase more felicitously, and, in short, fumble your way along. Those “mature” people whose lives are even without a single sour note or a single mistake, who never fumble, manage only at the cost of original thought and original action. They do without the successes as well as the failures. This has never appealed to me and that is another reason I could never accept the common image of maturity that was presented to me.It was only after I came back from Trial that I came to a notion of my own as to what maturity consists of. Maturity is the ability to sort the portions of truth from the accepted lies and self-deceptions that you have grown up with. It is easy now to see the irrelevance of the religious wars of the past, to see that capitalism in itself is not evil, to see that honor is most often a silly thing to kill a man for, to see that national patriotism should have meant nothing in the twenty-first century, to see that a correctly-arranged tie has very little to do with true social worth. It is harder to assess as critically the insanities of your own time, especially if you have accepted them unquestioningly for as long as you can remember, for as long as you have been alive. If you never make the attempt, whatever else you are, you are not mature.
Alexei Panshin
The dark uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
Randall Jarrell
Again, we find that the space standards of twenty-first century luxury are below the required minimum for dockworkers in 1962.
Owen Hatherley
He finds he cannot think of the dying men at all. Into his mind instead strays the picture of More on the scaffold, seen through the veil of rain: his body, already dead, folding back neatly from the impact of the axe. The cardinal when he fell had no persecutor more relentless than Thomas More. Yet, he thinks, I did not hate him. I exercised my skills to the utmost to persuade him to reconcile with the king. And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.
Hilary Mantel
Ethan Wyeth: I hope you're thirsty."Gideon Wyeth:"Why?"Ethan: "Cause your dumb and ugly, but I can do something about thirsty.
Orson Scott Card
It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.
Logan Pearsall Smith
The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.
H.L. Mencken
Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.
William Hazlitt
When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, 'Gnome Chomsky,' Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what?
Walter Kirn
I knew her so well that I loved her, or maybe I loved her so well that I knew her. I didn't want to fight her anymore. I wanted to quit. I wanted to go home. So I blew up her planet.
Orson Scott Card
I was taught when I was young that if people would only love one another all would be well with the world. This seemed simple and very nice but I found when I tried to put it in practice not only that other people were seldom lovable but that I was not very lovable myself.
George Bernard Shaw
Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.
Orson Scott Card
Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child...Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence.
Orson Scott Card