Quotes by Critics - Page 45

I have hope for you, if only because you're the only one left to hope for.
Orson Scott Card
Complexity is not an aesthetic criterion. It is a quality associated only with division and organization of labor.
Christopher Caudwell
Man is a make-believe animal - he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.
William Hazlitt
Lack of money is the root of all evil.
George Bernard Shaw
Ever since you and I were boys of fifteen, I have been in countless battles, from skirmishes to giant wars that determined the fate of nations; if there is one thing I have learned from all that experience, Garanth, it is that battles are alive. Battles are living things. As with beasts, you must try to know them, you must handle them with care and some love, but you must never take your eyes off them, or they will go for your throat. Battles are wild beasts that can never be truly tamed, Garanth. You need both a whip and meat if you want them to turn on your foes and not yourself. The general . . . does not understand this.
Kaoru Kurimoto
Friedrich Rückert wrote 425 poemsAfter his two youngest childrenDied from scarlet feverWithin sixteen days of each otherIn 1833 and 1834 he could not copeAnd often thought they had gone outFor a while "they'll be home soon"He told himself to tell his wife"They're only taking a long walk"Mahler scored five of those poemsIn 1901 and 1904 for a vocalistAnd an orchestra to break your heartAs soon as I heard the plaintive oboe And the descending movement of the hornAnd the lyric baritone enteringI felt I should not be listeningTo Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singingKindertotenlieder with the Berlin PhilharmonicMahler's wife was superstitiousAnd thought he was chancing disasterWith Songs on the Death of Children"Now the sun wants to rise so brightlyAs if nothing terrible had happened overnightThat tragedy happened to me alone"Mahler knew he could never have written themAfter his four-year-old daughter diedFrom scarlet fever three years laterHe said he felt sorry for himselfThat he needed to write these songsAnd for the world that would listen to them
Edward Hirsch
Fatherhood to us was an act of passion, soon forgot; but not to Orem ap Avonap. Never guessing that the blond and happy farmer was no blood of his, Orem had taken a part of that simple man into himself and saved it for this time. At any time in the Palace he might run by, Youth on this shoulders or, as time went by, toddling along behind.
Orson Scott Card
Those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them -- are ruinous!
William Dean Howells
People who put principles before people are people who hate people. They don’t much care about how well it works, just about how right it is … they may even like it better if it inflicts enough pain.
John Barnes
I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.
Mary McCarthy
Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since.
Edith Sitwell
[G]ive nothing centrality, because writing is about continually shifting weight from one thing and moment to the other.
Amit Chaudhuri
[Jane] Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else's stories -- entering into their feelings, validating their experiences -- is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness.
William Deresiewicz
I had written the sentence, 'You mustn't think that the evolution that gave rise to us was the only evolutionary possibility on this planet. . . . that cultural developments could be shaped through the mediation of another animal species. If the biological conditions were favorable, some civilization not inferior to our own could arise in the depths of the sea. . . . Would it do the same stupid things mankind has done? Would it invite the same historical calamities? What would we say if some animal other than man declared that its education and its numbers gave it the sole right to occupy the entire world and hold sway over all creation?
Karel Čapek
It made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise.
Orson Scott Card
Nothing is my last word on anything.
Henry James
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 one will ever save you.
Orson Scott Card
I picked up a snake once. In Italy.""Why did you do that?""For a bet.""Was it poisonous?""We didn't know. That was the point of the bet.""Did it bite you?""Of course.""Why of course?""It wouldn't be much of a story, would it? If I'd put it down unharmed, and away it slid?
Hilary Mantel
He had so much damn respect he wanted to scream.
Orson Scott Card
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
George Orwell
It is our entire culture, the way it runs on money, rewards inhumanity, encourages disconnection and isolation, causes great inequality and suffering, that's the enemy. That is the only enemy worth fighting.
Jessa Crispin
This is one of the bitter curses of poverty: it leaves no right to be generous.
George Gissing
Fantasy is storytelling with the beguiling power to transform the impossible into the imaginable, and to reveal our own “real” world in a fresh and truth-bearing light.
Leonard S. Marcus
O my son Absalom,' Bean said softly, knowing for the first time the kind of anguish that could tear such words from a man’s mouth. 'my son, my son Absalom. Would God I could die for thee, O Absalom, my son. My sons!
Orson Scott Card
The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
George Bernard Shaw
In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.
George Orwell
The self can watch itself becoming lazy, or non-watchful; this is an asset that can make both for humor and profound well-being.
Eli Siegel
If Ford Madox Ford were placed stark naked in a room totally empty he would contrive to turn it into a mess.
Ezra Pound
In creating the only hard thing's to begin A grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak.
James Russell Lowell
That fire you see can't last. Still, as it burns, it lights everything.
David Kirby
One more drink and I'd have been under the host.
Dorothy Parker
One is as one is and the love that can't encompass both is a poor sort of love.
Marya Mannes
We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.
Orson Scott Card
...much of poetry in the making is the fiddle with a few items. You lay a word against another and wait. You try another word. And another. Yet another. You wait. You begin again. Listening. Looking. For the elusive inevitable thing which has to arrive before it is recognised. And, like Odysseus, may not be recognised at first.
Craig Raine
Oh ParisFrom red to green all the yellow dies awayParis Vancouver Hyeres Maintenon New York and the AntillesThe window opens like an orangeThe beautiful fruit of light("Windows")
Guillaume Apollinaire
Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent — the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.
H.L. Mencken
We define genius as the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.
Bernard Berenson
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell
In any case, I hadn’t gone into the subject of dorm living too deeply with him, not because I hesitated to probe his tender spots but because I would have been probing my own. This is called tact, and is reputed to be a virtue.
Alexei Panshin
Some donkeys have amazing luck.
George Bernard Shaw
If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make... So-- as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of hour behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down, one by one, then you can always say, look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of dominoes that can be traced back in an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to... Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society.
Orson Scott Card
So often we rob tomorrow's memories by today's economies.
John Mason Brown
Why is it no one sent me yet one perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it's always just my luck to get one perfect rose.
Dorothy Parker
Of course, he didn't know anything about these Indonesians, or why they would have been there at this moment to save his life, but the fact that they had guns and weren't firing them at him implied that for the moment, at least, they were his dearest friends.
Orson Scott Card
Don't question your conscience so much--it will get out of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions.
Henry James
The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.
George Orwell
What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.
John Updike
We occasionally see something on the stage that reminds us a
William Hazlitt
Heaven is the most angelically dull place in all creation
George Bernard Shaw
Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.
William Hazlitt
We can overcome division only by refusing to be divided.
Raymond Williams
So do we discover, in the world, that our worst fears are unfulfilled; yet we must fear, in order that we may feel delight.
Peter Ackroyd
And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.
George Orwell
When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
George Bernard Shaw
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound
In my experience, influence is power.
Orson Scott Card
The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life. We don’t throw our forces away because every soldier is the queen of a one-member hive. But they’ve learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong- for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.
Orson Scott Card
And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?
Orson Scott Card
Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!
Henry James
Even Asmodeus, that limping devil who looked through rooftops at men's most secret actions, could not have told which of these thoughts masked an undercurrent of joy -- the joy of the man who know that he has killed wisely and well.
Anthony Boucher