Quotes by Critics - Page 42

It’s very silly,” she said, “but I go on with it in spite of myself. I’m afraid I’m too easily pleased; no novel is so silly I can’t read it.
Henry James
She lives on the fumes of whiskey and the iron in the blood of her prey.
Hilary Mantel
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
Edith Sitwell
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is in fact a return to the idealized past.
Robertson Davies
Where loyalty bound creatures together, they became something larger, something new and whole and inexplicable.
Orson Scott Card
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear-fear of the unknown the complex the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.
H.L. Mencken
Who now would thrust enquiry on / Beyond necessity of desire?
Geoffrey Hill
To have a solid foundation of skepticism, -that is to say, the faculty of changing at any moment, of turning back, of facing successively the metamorphoses of life.
Rémy de Gourmont
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
George Orwell
So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
George Orwell
Sexual thrills are not all physical, and although Parlabane was an unlikely seducer, even on the intellectual plane, it was clear that his desire was, by this prolonged tickling, to bring me to an orgasm of the mind.
Robertson Davies
So the whole war is beause we can't talk to each other.
Orson Scott Card
It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.
George Orwell
If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder.
H.L. Mencken
The great artist and thinker are the simplifiers.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
When I was small I dreamed of demons. I thought they were under my bed, but you said, it can't be so, you don't get demons our side of the river, the guards won't let them over London Bridge.
Hilary Mantel
Live all you can: it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?
Henry James
Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.
George Bernard Shaw
To die hating them, that was freedom.
George Orwell
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.
Meghan O'Rourke
Need we go into details about what I said to Judy? I am no poet, and I suppose what I said was very much what everybody always says, and although I remember her as speaking golden words, I cannot recall precisely anything she said. If love is to be watched and listened to without embarrassment, it must be transmuted into art, and I don't know how to do that, and it is not what I have come to Zurich to learn.
Robertson Davies
There were only four dissentients, the three dogs and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have voted on both sides.
George Orwell
In your dread of dictators you established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator, every financier a dictator, every private employer a dictator, all with the livelihood of the workers at their mercy, and no public responsibility. And to symbolize this state of things, this defeat of all government, you have set up in New York Harbour a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete this monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of Hell ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
George Bernard Shaw
In Russia you learn patience," said Ivan. "In America you learn action.
Orson Scott Card
This is how it works now with the news: the story begins with a moral, then a narrative is fashioned to support it.
Walter Kirn
Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house
William H. Gass
Let Fortune empty her whole quiver on me, I have a soul that, like an ample shield, Can take in all, and verge enough for more; Fate was not mine, nor am I Fate's: Souls know no conquerors.
John Dryden
Last night he kept the vigil alone. He lay awake, wishing Liz back; waiting for her to come and lie beside him. It's true he is at Esher with the cardinal, not at home at the Austin Friars. But, he thought, she'll know how to find me. She'll look for the cardinal, drawn through the space between worlds by incense and candlelight. Whereever the cardinal is, I will be.
Hilary Mantel
A letter from a French cleric to Nicholas of St. Albans, written c. 1178, rehearsed what was already a familiar perception: Your island is surrounded by water, and not unnaturally its inhabitants are affected by the nature of the element in which they live. Unsubstantial fantasies slide easily into their minds. They think their dreams to be visions, and their visions to be divine. We cannot blame them, for such is the nature of their land. I have often noticed that the English are greater dreams than the French.
Peter Ackroyd
Before one may scare the plain people one must first have a firm understanding of the bugaboos that most facilely alarm them. One must study the schemes that have served to do it in the past, and one must study very carefully the technic of the chief current professionals.
H.L. Mencken
Christmas is the marriage of chaos and design. The real sound of life, for once, can burst out because a formal place has been set for it. At the moment when things have gotten sufficiently loose, the secret selves that these familiar persons hold inside them shake the room...An undercurrent of clowning and jostling is part of the process by which we succeed finally in making our necessary noise: despite the difficulty of getting the words right, of getting the singers on the same page, of keeping the ritual from falling apart into the anarchy of separate impulses. From such clatter--extended and punctuated by whatever instrument is handy, a triangle a tambourine, a Chinese gone--beauty is born.
Geoffrey O'Brien
For the crown of our life as it closesIs darkness, the fruit there of dust;No thorns go as deep as the rose's,And love is more cruel than lust.Time turns the old days to derision,Our loves into corpses or wives;And marriage and death and divisionMake barren our lives.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. 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
Order and disorder', said the speaker, 'they each have their beauty.
Orson Scott Card
My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.
George Bernard Shaw
Remember that the bad days are not forever, and the trouble which seems so terrible at last.
George Orwell
Some screw for science only in the afternoon, while others keep their faith with evening—here Orcutt chuckled—it's a matter of light, I understand, but which makes which I can't remember.
William H. Gass
Wake up! Be yourself, not a bad copy of something else!
Robertson Davies
She's beautiful,' he murmured.'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.
George Orwell
Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman.
George Gissing
And if my heart be scarred and burned,The safer, I, for all I learned.
Dorothy Parker
Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants.
Olivia Laing
Happiness and beauty are by-products. Folly is the direct pursuit of happiness and beauty.
George Bernard Shaw
Did they love me? The question is beside the point, somehow. Certainly they each spoiled me, mainly by giving me the false impression that I was entitled to attention nearly all the the time. They played. THEY were like children, if you consider that one of the things about being a child is that you are a parasite of sorts and have to brazen out self-righteously. I want. They were good at wanting and I shared much more common ground with them than with my mother when I was three or four years old.
Lorna Sage
The door was flung open. Maurice Duplay filled it; energetic master, shirt- sleeves rolled up. He threw out his arms, the good Jacobin Duplay, and formed a sentence totally original, something which had never been uttered in the history of the world: “Camille, you have a son, and your wife is very well, and is asking you to be at home, right now.
Hilary Mantel
Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.
Dorothy Parker
Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him.
Rémy de Gourmont
Fashion which elevates the bad to the level of the good subsequently turns its back on bad and good alike.
Eric Bentley
The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.
George Bernard Shaw
Does anyone ask a painter -- even the painter himself -- why he paints? Now me, I painted... used to... whatever I saw that was beautiful. It had to be beautiful to me, through and through, before I would paint it. And I used to be a pretty simple fellow, and found many completely beautiful things to paint.But the older you get the fewer completely beautiful things you see. Every flower has a brown spot somewhere, and a hippogriff has evil laughter. So at some point in his development an artist has to paint, not what he sees (which is what I've always done) but the beauty in what he sees. Most painters, I think, cross this line early; I'm crossing it late.("To Here and the Easel", 1954)
Theodore Sturgeon
The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.
George Bernard Shaw
As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.
William H. Gass
We must be doing something to be happy.
William Hazlitt
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.
Ezra Pound
You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
Terry Eagleton
It's never what you say but how you make it sound sincere.
Marya Mannes
There are two things to aim at in life: first to get what you want and after that to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.
Logan Pearsall Smith
I am that which unloves me and loves; I am stricken, and I am the blow.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
There are other things to a woman than taking her to bed.
Kingsley Amis
After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement.
Jules de Goncourt