Quotes by Literary Critics - Page 3

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.
Edward Said
The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.
Harold Bloom
Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.
Roland Barthes
The 'swapping' is interesting. This practice one had thought confined to certain earnest Americans in the smaller, more tedious cities, to those wives and husbands who had read sex manuals and radically wanted more of life even if it had to be, like pizza, brought in from around the corner--all of this was accomplished by Bloomsbury in the lightest, most spontaneous and good-natured manner.
Elizabeth Hardwick
I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind.
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve
We belong to a nation, whose fate is to shoot at the enemy with diamonds.
Stanisław Pigoń
For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
Roland Barthes
The moon twangs its silver strings;The river swoons into town;The wind beds down in the pines,Covers itself with stars.
George Elliott Clarke
An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit.
Samuel R. Delany
Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is neither he nor she; the other has only a name of his own, or her own name. The third-person pronoun is a wicked pronoun: it is the pronoun of the non-person, it absents, it annuls. When I realize that common discourse takes possession of my other and restores that other to me in the bloodless form of a universal substitute, applied to all the things which are not here, it is as if I saw my other dead, reduced, shelved in an urn upon the wall of the great mausoleum of language. For me, the other cannot be a referent: you are never anything but you, I do not want the Other to speak of you.
Roland Barthes
Why is it that so many people are afraid to admit that they are happy?
William Lyon Phelps
We try to bring up our children so that they are protected from the world's evils, only to find we've raised a pack of innocents who seem to be about to stumble into them at every turn just from sheer stupidity!
Samuel R. Delany
What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one's own language as it is perceived in someone else's language, coming to know one's own belief system in someone else's system.
Mikhail Bakhtin
His way was like other people's; he mounted no high horse; he was justa man and a citizen. He indulged in no Socratic irony. But hisdiscourse was full of Attic grace; those who heard it went away neitherdisgusted by servility, nor repelled by ill-tempered censure, but onthe contrary lifted out of themselves by charity, and encouraged tomore orderly, contented, hopeful lives.
Arthur Quiller-Couch
The real question is: How sturdy and solid is the floor our civilization stands on? How many lives with no prospects, shattered and senseless, can it bear the weight of before it cracks somewhere or other, splits at the joints?
Christa Wolf
Nevertheless the severance is rather casual and it drops a stain on our admiration of Nora. Ibsen has put the leaving of her children on the same moral and emotional level as the leaving of her husband and we cannot, in our hearts, asssent to that. It is not only the leaving but the way the play does not have time for suffering, changes of heart. Ibsen has been too much a man in the end. He has taken the man's practice, if not his stated belief, that where self-realization is concerned children shall not be an impediment.
Elizabeth Hardwick
The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.
Roland Barthes
In the most secret heart of every intellectual ... there lies hidden ... the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man.
Lionel Trilling
Whenever it is possible a boy should choose some occupation which he should do even if he did not need the money.
William Lyon Phelps
All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.
Edward Said
Carelessness is not fatal to journalism nor are cliches for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once a journalist has to accept the fact that his work by its very todayness is excluded from any share in tomorrow.
Cyril Connolly
The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.
Harold Bloom
...that out of the quarrel with others we produce rhetoric, matter for the editorial page, while out of the quarrel with ourselves we create art.
Frank Lentricchia
To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought...?
Roland Barthes
the calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one’s own; to induce in others a love for that which one loves; to make of one’s inward present their future; that is a threefold adventure like no other.
George Steiner
That daily life is really good one appreciates when one wakes from a horrible dream or when one takes the first outing after a sickness. Why not realize it now?
William Lyon Phelps
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
Cyril Connolly
One picks one's way about through the glass and aluminum doors, the receptionists' smiles, the lunches with too much alcohol, the openings with more, the mobs of people desperately trying to define good taste in such loud voices one can hardly hear oneself giggle, while the shebang is lit by flashes and flares through the paint-stained window, glimmers under the police-locked door, or, if one is taking a rare walk outside that day, by a light suffusing the whole sky, complex as the northern aurora.
Samuel R. Delany
The word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.
Rebecca West
stupidity: a process, not a state. A human being takes in far more information than he or she can put out. “Stupidity” is a process or strategy by which a human, in response to social denigration of the information she or he puts out, commits him or herself to taking in no more information than she or he can put out. (Not to be confused with ignorance, or lack of data.) Since such a situation is impossible to achieve because of the nature of mind/perception itself in its relation to the functioning body, a continuing downward spiral of functionality and/or informative dissemination results,’ and he understood why! ‘The process, however, can be reversed,’ the voice continued, ‘at any time.
Samuel R. Delany
One can be enlightened about proofs as well as theorems. Without enlightenment, one is merely reduced to memorizing proofs. With enlightenment about a proof, its flow becomes clear and it can become an item of astonishing beauty. In addition, the need to memorize disappears because the proof has become part of your soul.
Herbert S. Gaskill
Engulfment is a moment of hypnosis.
Roland Barthes
[On Jane Austen] She was fully possessed of the idealism which is a necessary ingredient of the great satirist. If she criticized the institutions of earth, it was because she had very definite ideas regarding the institutions of heaven.
Rebecca West
Everybody knows that. The missing step is always the next.
Óscar Lopes
Social class. Class remains our national awkward topic, usually mumbled over in academic diversity workshops; indeed, most people don't know how to talk about class without automatically coupling it with race. That's because we Americans are loath to recognize that the sky's-the-limit potential we take as our birthright comes at a price far beyond what many Americans--of any race--can afford to pay.
Maureen Corrigan
A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality
Harold Bloom
In trying to justify the humanities, as in trying to live a life, what may turn out to matter most is holding one's nerve.
Stefan Collini
As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.
Roland Barthes
Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.
Roland Barthes
Do not forgive. Forgiveness accuses before it forgives. By accusing, by stating the injury, it makes the wrong irredeemable. It carries the blow all the way to culpability. Thus, all becomes irrepairable; giving and forgiving cease to be possible. For nothing saves innocence. Forgive me for forgiving you. The sole fault would be one of position: the one and only fault is to be "I,", for it is not identity that the Self in myself brings me. This self is merely a formal necessity: it simply serves to allow the infinite relation of Self to Other. Whence the temptation (the sole temptation) to become a subject again, instead of being exposed to subjectivity without any subject, the nudity of dying space.I cannot forgive -- forgiveness comes from others -- but I cannot be forgiven either, if forgiveness is what calls the "I" into question and demands that I give myself, that I subject myself to the lack of subjectivity. And if forgiveness comes from others, it only comes; there is never any certitude that it can arrive, because in it there is nothing of the (sacramental) power to determine. It can only delay in the element of indecision. In The Trail, one might think that the death scene constitutes the pardon, the end of the interminable; but there is no end, since Kafka specifies that shame survives, which is to say, the infinite itself, a mockery of life as life's beyond.
Maurice Blanchot
Every system of power in the world has a vested interest in weakening the individuality of its subjects and tries to weaken or it possible completely extinguish it.
Christa Wolf
I transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing.
Roland Barthes
Only two possible reactions to the mimetic contagion exist, and they make an enormous difference. Either we surrender and join the persecuting crowd, or we resist and stand alone. The first way is the unanimous self-deception we call mythology.
René Girard
Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing but if the writer deliberately aims at truth he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.
Northrop Frye
King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.
Harold Bloom
Reading centers on finding yourself in a book. -- Sherman Alexie
Anita Silvey
Every command slaps liberty in the face.
Mikhail Bakhtin
Let the darkness transform into rockacross the wilderness of my memory
Xiaobo Liu
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." - "Meglio scrivere per se stessi e non avere un pubblico piuttosto che scrivere per gli altri e non essere se stessi".
Cyril Connolly
It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.
Maureen Corrigan
Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.
Roland Barthes
exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.
Edward Said
The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
Cyril Connolly
As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.
Roland Barthes
For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.
Rebecca West
The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent tings, but because on each occasion (i)it fills the sight by force(i), and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so).
Roland Barthes
The yellow eyes had fallen from the tired star. Lorq's face erupted about the scar at some antic from the Mouse that Katin had missed. Rage, Katin pondered. Rage. Yes, he is laughing. But how is anyone supposed to distinguish between laughter and rage in that face? But the others were laughing too. Yet some way, somehow, we do.
Samuel R. Delany
A ceremony of self-wastage - good talkers are miserable they know that they have betrayed themselves that they have taken material which should have a life of its own to disperse it in noises upon the air.
Cyril Connolly
I feel separated and cut off from the world around me, but occasionally I've felt that it was really a part of me, and I hope I'll have that feeling again, and that next time it won't go away. That's a dim, misty outline of the story that's told so often, of how man once lived in a golden age or a garden of Eden or the Hesperides ... how that world was lost, and how we some day may be able to get it back again. ... This story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
Northrop Frye
There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.
Anatole Broyard