Quotes by Critics - Page 36

Religion is tied to the deepest feelings people have. The love that arises from that stewing pot is the sweetest and strongest, but the hate is the hottest, and the anger is the most violent.
Orson Scott Card
The evidence knocked clean out of their hands. Nothing but suspicion left…and you can’t arrest a murderer on suspicion, oh dear no! Only felonious loiterer’s and housebreakers and low scum like that. Not an artist in death, like Edmund Alfred Bickleigh, Esq. MRCS, LRCP.
Francis Iles
New York: A third-rate Babylon.
H.L. Mencken
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind — that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech — alike for the humblest man and the mightiest, and in the utmost freedom of conduct that is consistent with living in organized society.I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.I believe in the reality of progress.I —But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.
H.L. Mencken
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
George Bernard Shaw
Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
Geoff Dyer
What I'm going to do is pry every stinking tag off these f.ing chairs and make a f.ing collar and throw that cat right in Connor's puked-up face. Pale turd.
John Updike
Devise some creed, and live it, beyond theirs,Or I shall think you but their spendthrift heirs.
Edmund Blunden
The question of what exactly we remember when we listen to old recordings, or whether it can be called remembering at all, becomes less and less answerable over a lifetime.
Geoffrey O'Brien
I was washing outside in the darkness,the sky burning with rough stars,and the starlight, salt on an axe-blade.The cold overflows the barrel.The gate's locked,the land's grim as its conscience.I don't think they'll find the new weaving,finer than truth, anywhere.Star-salt is melting in the barrel,icy water is blackening,death's growing purer, misfortune saltier,the earth's moving nearer to truth and to dread.
Innokenty Annensky
A weapon is merely a weapon, nothing more. What matters is how you use it.
Kaoru Kurimoto
An improper mind is a perpetual feast.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Tears flow and smiles fade to the same rhythm of life, to disappear together in the bottomless abyss.
Rémy de Gourmont
Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.
Joyce Carol Oates
Despite these afternoon misgivings and self-reproaches I clung to my notion, ill-defined though it was, that a serious study of human knowledge, or theory, or belief, if undertaken with a critical but not a cruel mind, would in the end yield some secret, some valuable permanent insight, into the nature of life and the true end of man.
Robertson Davies
It seems to be difficult if not impossible for human beings to avoid thinking of government as mystical entity with a nature and a history all its own. It constitutes for them a creature somehow interposed between themselves and the great flow of cosmic events, and they look to it to think for them and to protect them. In democratic countries it is theoretically their agent, but there seems to be a strong tendency to convert the presumably free citizen into its agent, or at all events, its client. This exalted view of its scope, character, powers and autonomy is fundamentally false. A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men…. Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general, have come to a degree of puissance in the world that is unchallenged by that of any other group. Their fiats, however preposterous, are generally obeyed as a matter of duty, they are assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom, and the lives of multitudes are willingly sacrificed in their interest.
H.L. Mencken
Sion calls Anne an eel, he calls her a slippery dipper from the slime, and he remembers what the cardinal had called her: my serpentine enemy. Sion says, she goes to it with her brother; he says, what, her brother George? ‘Any brother she's got. Those kind keep it in the family. They do filthy French tricks, like –’‘Can you keep your voice down?’ He looks around, as if spies might be swimming by the boat.‘– and that's how she trusts herself she don't give in to Henry, because if she lets him do it and she gets a boy he's, thanks very much, now clear off, girl – so she's oh, Your Highness, I never could allow – because she knows that very night her brother's inside her, licking her up to the lungs, and then he's, excuse me, sister, what shall I do with this big package – she says, oh,don't distress yourself, my lord brother, shove it up the back entry, it'll come to no harm there.
Hilary Mantel
For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian──ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection that unattainable by the highest art.
Lytton Strachey
Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.
Joyce Carol Oates
He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure.
Henry James
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
John Updike
I think Bonzo died. I dreamed about it last night. I remembered the way he looked after I jammed his face with my head. I think I must have pushed his nose back into his brain. The blood was coming out of his eyes. I think he was dead right then.
Orson Scott Card
How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmaresif there seemed any danger of their coming true!
Logan Pearsall Smith
We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us ashamed of ourselves of our relatives of our incomes of our accents of our opinion of our experience just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.
George Bernard Shaw
Ours is a shockingly dead view of creation. We ourselves are the only things in the universe to which we grant an authentic vitality, and because of this we are not fully alive.
Frederick Turner
Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.
Malcolm Cowley
The world has never favored the experimental life. It despises poets, fanatics, prophets and lovers.
Randolph Bourne
We pray for a messenger from God—who knows but what the messenger also prayed for a place to take his message?
Orson Scott Card
it's hard to talk sensibly with giants - their massive heads tend to get lost in the clouds
Rick Poynor
I require three things in a man: he must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.
Dorothy Parker
Ender had come to feel a unity so strong that the word we came to his lips much more easily than I.
Orson Scott Card
Every song may be someone's personal implement of torture.
Francine Prose
Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is doing a public service.
Leslie Stephen
Whatever you may be sure of be sure of this - that you are dreadfully like other people.
James Russell Lowell
Before she continued her search she sat in his revolving desk chair, and wept for the passing of time, and the necessary death of the well-loved, wise old man.
Robertson Davies
They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three.
James Russell Lowell
You don't teach a person how to write as much as you teach that person how to survive the writing process.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one's surface interest then it has failed. Whatever else it may or may not be, art is also entertainment. Bad art fails to entertain. Good art does something in addition.
Brigid Brophy
Deprived of the infinite, man has become what he always was: a supernumerary. He hardly counts; he forms part of the troupe called Humanity; if he misses a cue, he is hissed; and if he drops through the trapdoor another puppet is in readiness to take his place.
Rémy de Gourmont
A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
George Orwell
In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is "good". Nor is there any way of definitely proving that--for instance--Warwick Beeping is "bad". Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.
George Orwell
Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.
Meghan O'Rourke
When I was a child, to call someone 'black' was an insult, a curse word, something that made you fight.But to me it contains all of the history of oppression and resistance, of being close to the soil and the sky, of plain speaking. Of The Journey.
Bonnie Greer
I don't need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself.
Henry James
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
George Bernard Shaw
Who is content with nothing possesses all things.
Nicolas Boileau
If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.
Dorothy Parker
You think You're frightening me with Your hell, don't You? You think Your hell is worse than mine.
Dorothy Parker
If human equality is to be for ever averted — if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently — then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
George Orwell
There are times when every act, no matter how private or unconscious, becomes political. Whom you live with, how you wear your hair, whether you marry, whether you insist that your child take piano lessons, what are the brand names on your shelf; all these become political decisions. At other times, no act--no campaign or tract, statement or rampage--has any political charge at all. People with the least sense of which times are, and which are not, political are usually most avid about politics. At six one morning, Will went out in jeans and a frayed sweater to buy a quart of milk. A tourist bus went by. The megaphone was directed at him. "There's one," it said. That was in the 1960's. Ever since, he's wondered. There's one what?
Renata Adler
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Ezra Pound
The sinner I was expecting was guilty of pride, lust and spiritual despair, not merely of sloth and ineptitude. This was the diary of a nobody. So I nearly censored January to June 1933 in the interests of Grandpa's glamour as a Gothic personage. But in truth this is what we should be exposed to - the awful knowledge that when they're not breaking the commandments, the anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless.
Lorna Sage
Just think about it," he said softly. "You can do practically anything. You can have practically everything. And none of it will keep you from being alone.""Shut up shut up...Everybody's alone."He nodded. "But some people learn how to live with it.
Theodore Sturgeon
What a waste of time to be posthumously famous.
Orson Scott Card
It's and old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.
Gail Caldwell
Unfortunately, since there was only one of him, most of his riches were wasted.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Unionism seldom if ever uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.
H.L. Mencken
You may remember that on earth—though of course we never confessed it—the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.
George Bernard Shaw
Every time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending...you're still enthralled.(Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)
Hilary Mantel
I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.
George Orwell