Quotes by Critics - Page 47

He had also learned that there is no use murdering people; there are always so many left, and if you tried to murder them all you would never get anything else done.
Will Cuppy
The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.
William Hazlitt
Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound
Music isn't just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It's a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it's joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort in grief. Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes through music? How, then, could I be so ungrateful as to refuse the message?
Orson Scott Card
Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.
Greil Marcus
Fun is essential to mastering the serious side of life. It provides the balance that keeps us sane
Peter Nicholls
Farewell, ungrateful traitor, Farewell, my perjured swain;Let never injured creature Believe a man again.The pleasure of possessingSurpasses all expressing,But 'tis too short a blessing, And love too long a pain.'Tis easy to deceive us In pity of your pain;But when we love you leave us To rail at you in vain.Before we have descried itThere is no bliss beside it,But she that once has tried it Will never love again.The passion we pretended Was only to obtain,But when the charm is ended The charmer you disdain.Your love by ours we measureTill we have lost our treasure,But dying is a pleasure When living is a pain.
John Dryden
Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
H.L. Mencken
I wonder why the wind, even the wind doth seemTo mock me now, all night, all night, andHave I strayed among the cliffs hereThey say, some day I'll fallDown through the sea-bit fissures, and no moreKnow the warm cloak of sun, or batheThe dew across my tired eyes to comfort them.They try to keep me hid within four walls.I will not stay!
Ezra Pound
Although the art world is frequently characterised as a classless scene where artists from lower-msddle-class backgrounds drink champagne with high-priced hedge-fund managers, scholarly curators, fashion designers and other "creatives," you'd be mistaken if you thought the world was egalitarian or democratic. Art is about experimenting with ideas, but it is also about excellence and exclusion. In a society where everyone is looking for a little distinction, it's an intoxicating combination.
Sarah Thornton
I'm a little wounded but I am not slain I will lay me down to bleed a while. Then I'll rise and fight again.
John Dryden
Evil is not good's absence but gravity'severlasting bedrock and its fatal chainsinert, violent, the suffrage of our days.
Geoffrey Hill
Interestingly, this speech by Prospero does not contrast the unreality of the stage with the solid, flesh-and-blood existence of real men and women. On the contrary, it seizes on the flimsiness of dramatic characters as a metaphor for the fleeting, fantasy-ridden quality of actual human lives. It is we who are made of dreams, not just such figments of Shakespeare’s imagination as Ariel and Caliban. The cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of this earth are mere stage scenery after all.
Terry Eagleton
In the forest you may find yourself lost, without companions. You may come to a river which is not on a map. You may lose sight of your quarry, and forget why you are there. You may meet a dwarf, or the living Christ, or an old enemy of yours; or a new enemy, one you do not know until you see his face appear between the rustling leaves, and see the glint of his dagger. You may find a woman asleep in a bower of leaves. For a moment, before you don’t recognise her, you will think she is someone you know.
Hilary Mantel
In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.
Terry Eagleton
It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.
Walter Pater
Do not shout at me, Mr. Quill," said John [Adams]. "Justice may be blind, but she is not deaf.
Orson Scott Card
The crime rates would go right down, I think, if Americans stopped saying: 'Have a nice day,' to one another. At least it would stop me from contemplating violence; when people in shops & so on order me to have a nice day in this authoritarian way, I want to kill, kill, kill. When I mutter 'sod off' under my breath, they think it is a Russian Orthodox benediction.
Susannah Clapp
Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.
Guillaume Apollinaire
(it was) beautiful, like so many senseless things.
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love.
Orson Scott Card
The stationary condition is the beginning of the end
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.
Edmund Wilson
To be faithful to your instincts and the impulses that carry you in the direction of the excellence you most desire and value ... surely that is to lead the noble life.
George E. Woodberry
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
H.L. Mencken
England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills into the mist.
Hilary Mantel
The problem with communication…is the illusion that is has been accomplished.
George Bernard Shaw
...I like to see things through the lens of Greek tragedy, which teaches us, among other things, that real tragedy is never a straightforward confrontation between Good and Evil, but is rather much more exquisitely and much more agonizingly, a conflict between two irreconcilable views of the world.
Daniel Mendelsohn
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
Ezra Pound
My paper was a direct discussion and comparison of half-a-dozen ethical systems, concentrating on what seemed to me to be their flaws. I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were *right* and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions
Alexei Panshin
But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him the horror was that he might also be wrong.
George Orwell
A writer’s promise is like a tiger’s smile
Lytton Strachey
A soldier is an anachronism of which we must get rid.
George Bernard Shaw
How can she? She's incapable of understanding anything. Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?
George Bernard Shaw
You'll go far. How do I know? Because life is goosing you so hard you'll never stop climbing.
Robertson Davies
I don't know much about being a millionaire, but I'll bet I'd be darling at it.
Dorothy Parker
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell
We may by our excessive prudence squeeze out of the life we are guarding so anxiously all the adventurous quality that makes it worth living.
Randolph Bourne
If there is anything in writing that comes easy for me it's making up metaphors. They just appear. I can't move two lines without all kinds of images. Then the problem is how to make the best of them. In its geological character, language is almost invariably metaphorical. That's how meanings tend to change. Words become metaphors for other things, then slowly disappear into the new image. I have a hunch, too, that the core of creativity is located in metaphor, in model making, really. A novel is a large metaphor for the world.
william gass
If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis
I am only a beer teetotaller not a champagne teetotaller.
George Bernard Shaw
So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.
Orson Scott Card
We often choose a friend as we do a mistress for no particular excellence in themselves but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.
William Hazlitt
Hindoo wisdom long ago regarded the world as the dream of Brahma. Must we hold with Fichte that it is the individual dream of each individual ego? Every fool would then be a cosmogonic poet producing the firework of the universe under the dome of the infinite.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Wit has truth in it wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
Dorothy Parker
We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves unable to see that here now this very moment is sacred but once it's gone-its value is incontestable.
Joyce Carol Oates
To feel that one has a place in life solves half the problem of contentment.
George E. Woodberry
An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.
George Bernard Shaw
Thankfulness is the beginning of gratitude. Gratitude is the completion of thankfulness. Thankfulness may consist merely of words. Gratitude is shown in acts.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
All nationalistic distinctions - all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect - are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.
George Orwell
Might not too much investment in teaching Shelley mean falling behind our economic competitors? But there is no university without humane inquiry, which means that universities and advanced capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. And the political implications of that run far deeper than the question of student fees.
Terry Eagleton
to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing
David Lodge
Do you know why you’re here? Shall I tell you why we brought you here? To cure you.To make you sane.
George Orwell
Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.
George Bernard Shaw
Some books you never get over, like a first love. Some books that made an enormous impression on you when you were young you are afraid to read again years later, like being sorry you met that former love for coffee, because you couldn’t see what you once saw. But there are those few books that can still move you in the old, throbbing way.""How I got over
Darryl Pinckney
You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.
Hilary Mantel
Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
H.L. Mencken
Usury is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon's knife of fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.
Ezra Pound
The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.
Henry James
Opportunity rarely knocks until you are ready. And few people have ever been really ready without receiving opportunity's call.
Channing Pollock