Quotes by Critics - Page 38

Thoughts, pictures of him would come to me just a second after waking, shocking me from the forgetfulness of sleep, striking blows that were almost physical. And even in sleep I was not completely free. So often sleep brought dreams of him.
Bernard Taylor
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
George Orwell
We must give ourselves more earnestly and intelligently and generously than we have to the happy duty of appreciation.
Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer
When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
H.L. Mencken
But I had to think to myself that this was normal, because that was the attitude. I was 19 when I went to see my doctor and I was told it was all in the mind.[Author Hilary Mantel on being told her endometriosis was imagined pain, From Oct 2009 Daily Mail interview]
Hilary Mantel
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
H.L. Mencken
What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities of having a patient but restless mind of sacrificing one's ease or vanity of uniting a love of detail to foresight and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully.
Charles Victor Cherbuliez
And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
George Orwell
That's what Ender has to understand. There really is evil in the world, and wickedness, and every brand of stupidity. There's meanness and heartlessness and... I don't even know which of them is me." - Hyrum Graff
Orson Scott Card
Extreme civilization robs crime of its frightful poetry, and prevents the writer from restoring it. That would be too dreadful, say those good souls who want everything to be prettified, even the horrible. In the name of philanthropy, imbecile criminologists reduce the punishment, and inept moralists the crime, and what is more they reduce the crime only in order to reduce the punishment. Yet the crimes of extreme civilization are undoubtedly more atrocious than those of extreme barbarism, by virtue of their refinement, of the corruption they imply and of their superior degree of intellectualism. ("A Woman's Vengeance")
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
For after all, what is there behind, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O lord, give me money, only money.
George Orwell
Never believe a rumor of my death,' said Peter. 'I have as many lives as a cat. Also as many teeth, as many claws, and the same cheery, cooperative disposition.
Orson Scott Card
Be sweet to one another. Stay in this beauty and brawl against the world's power of pulling apart. Recall Old Testament terminology: covenant, sacred, sacrifice. And mind always that Adam wasn’t a schlep fruitily duped by Eve. He turned his back on God because he knew that a paradise without her was no paradise at all.
William Giraldi
Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.
Guillaume Apollinaire
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
H.L. Mencken
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
George Orwell
Class was what formed you, but didn’t travel to other cultures – it became invisible abroad. In foreign places, you were singled out by religion and race, but not class, which was more indecipherable than any other mother tongue. He’d learnt that not only were light, language, and weather contingent – class was too.
Amit Chaudhuri
Generosity with strings is not generosity: it is a deal.
Marya Mannes
The power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.
Orson Scott Card
Here was a flower (the daisy reflected) strangely like itself and yet utterly unlike itself too. Such a paradox has often been the basis for the most impassioned love.
Thomas M. Disch
And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.
Joyce Carol Oates
What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.
Hilary Mantel
It takes a long time to grow an old friend.
John Leonard
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
George Bernard Shaw
Sweet for a little even to fear, and sweet,tO love, to lay down fear at love’s fair feet;tShall not some fiery memory of his breathtLie sweet on lips that touch the lips of death?tYet leave me not; yet, if thou wilt, be free;Love me no more, but love my love of thee.tLove where thou wilt, and live thy life; and I,tOne thing I can, and one love cannot—die.tPass from me; yet thine arms, thine eyes, thine hair,tFeed my desire and deaden my despair.Yet once more ere time change us, ere my cheektWhiten, ere hope be dumb or sorrow speak,tYet once more ere thou hate me, one full kiss;tKeep other hours for others, save me this.tYea, and I will not (if it please thee) weep,Lest thou be sad; I will but sigh, and sleep.tSweet, does death hurt? thou canst not do me wrong:tI shall not lack thee, as I loved thee, long.tHast thou not given me above all that livetJoy, and a little sorrow shalt not give?What even though fairer fingers of strange girlstPass nestling through thy beautiful boy’s curlstAs mine did, or those curled lithe lips of thinetMeet theirs as these, all theirs come after mine;tAnd though I were not, though I be not, best,I have loved and love thee more than all the rest.tO love, O lover, loose or hold me fast,tI had thee first, whoever have thee last;tFairer or not, what need I know, what care?tTo thy fair bud my blossom once seemed fair.Why am I fair at all before thee, whytAt all desired? seeing thou art fair, not I.tI shall be glad of thee, O fairest head,tAlive, alone, without thee, with thee, dead;tI shall remember while the light lives yet,And in the night-time I shall not forget.tThough (as thou wilt) thou leave me ere life leave,tI will not, for thy love I will not, grieve;tNot as they use who love not more than I,tWho love not as I love thee though I die;And though thy lips, once mine, be oftener presttTo many another brow and balmier breast,tAnd sweeter arms, or sweeter to thy mind,tLull thee or lure, more fond thou wilt not find.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell.
George Bernard Shaw
[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.
George Bernard Shaw
Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along--the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires. And in writing _Ender's Game_, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective--the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as real and important as any adult's. ... _Ender's Game_ asserts the personhood of children, and those who are used to thinking of children in another way ... are going to find _Ender's Game_ a very unpleasant place to live.
Orson Scott Card
I like to have a martini,Two at the very most.After three I'm under the table,after four I'm under my host.
Dorothy Parker
The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive.
Terry Eagleton
here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered; happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat-pocket; portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint-bottle; and peace of mind could be sent down by the mail.
Thomas de Quincey
Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief.
John Updike
Pessimism is a very easy way out when you’re considering what life really is, because pessimism is a short view of life. If you look at what is happening around us today and what has happened just since you were born, you can’t help but feel that life is a terrible complexity of problems and illnesses of one sort or another. But if you look back a few thousand years, you realize that we have advanced fantastically from the day when the first amoeba crawled out of the slime and made its adventure on land. If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of man or the future of the world.
Robertson Davies
Never so sure our rapture to createAs when it touch'd the brink of all we hate.
William Hazlitt
Talk uses up ideas. ... Once I have spoken them aloud they are lost to me dissipated into the noisy air like smoke. Only if I bury them like bulbs in the rich soil of silence do they grow.
Doris Grumbach
Over and over these organizations tell America that family, above all, is what Christianity is about. Devotion to one's family is, indeed, a wonderful thing. Yet it is hardly something to brag about. For all except the most pathologically self-absorbed, love for one's parents, spouse, and children comes naturally. Jesus did not make it his business to affirm these ties; he didn't have to. Jews feel them, Buddhists feel them, Confucians and Zoroastrians and atheists feel them. Christianity is not about reinforcing such natural bonds and instinctive sentiments. Rather, Christianity is about challenging them and helping us to see all of humankind as our family. It seems clear that if Jesus had wanted to affirm the "traditional family" in the way that Pat Robertson claims, he would not have lived the way he did.
Bruce Bawer
They have influence, but no power." "In my experience, influence is power.
Orson Scott Card
Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm and behave as outrageously as the world will let them.
Logan Pearsall Smith
For a lot of people, poetry tends to be dull. It's not read much. It takes a special kind of training and a lot of practice to read poetry with pleasure. It's like learning to like asparagus.
Thomas M. Disch
What no wife of a writer understands is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.
Burton Rascoe
For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
William H. Gass
Legs was always proud even before FOXFIRE, that’s the primary fact about Legs Sadovsky: pride.
Joyce Carol Oates
He is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he's pleasuring himself.
Hilary Mantel
Time is a great legalizer even in the field of morals.
H.L. Mencken
When it comes to the pinch human beings are heroic.
George Orwell
For money buys all virtues. Money suffereth long and is kid, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own
George Orwell
Morality and honor are not to be confused. "The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
H.L. Mencken
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
George Orwell
The same reason makes a man a religious enthusiast that makes a man an enthusiast in any other way ... an uncomfortable mind in an uncomfortable body.
William Hazlitt
It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.
Gail Caldwell
What, indeed, is a New Yorker? Is he Jew or Irish? Is he English or German? Is he Russian or Polish? He may be something of all these, and yet he is wholly none of them. Something has been added to him which he had not had before. he is endowed with a briskness and an invention often alien to his blood. He is quicker in his movement, less trammeled in his judgement...The change he undergoes is unmistakeable, New York, indeed, resembles a magic cauldron. Those who are cast into it are born again.
Charles Whibley
I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn— that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you’re a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale. (Introduction to Ender's Game)
Orson Scott Card
She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.
George Orwell
My father always said that government is like watching another man piss in your boot. Someone feels better but it certainly isn't you.
Orson Scott Card
The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated he forgets truths which are too simple.
Dame Rebecca West
She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there'd be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than magnifying differences between people, language might just as easily soften them, minimize them, smooth things over so that people could get along even though they really didn't understand each other. The illusion of comprehension allowed people to think they were more alike than they really were. Maybe language was better.
Orson Scott Card
Penetrating so many secrets we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless calmly licking its chops.
H.L. Mencken
A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also a schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man.
Robertson Davies
The devil?” Jason heaved the tick over his shoulder like a collier with his sack. “Satan. The adversary. The enemy of the plan of God. The undoer. The destroyer. Yes. He definitely was.” Jason smiled. “But he meant well.
Orson Scott Card