Quotes by Critics - Page 3

Things perish. Gods have passed.But song sublimely castShall citadels outlast.

Théophile Gautier

Must I at length the Sword of Justice draw?Oh curst Effects of necessary Law!How ill my Fear they by my Mercy scan,Beware the Fury of a Patient Man.

John Dryden

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

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

John Updike

My master wishes to see you," said the mounted man."When the planting's done," I said."Lord Barton is unaccustomed to waiting.""Then he should rejoice, for he'll learn something new today." I went back to the garden. Soon the servant left.

Orson Scott Card

If we have any role at all, I think it’s the role of optimism, not blind or stupid optimism, but the kind which is meaningful, one that is rather close to that notion of the world which is not perfect, but which can be improved. In other words, we don’t just sit and hope that things will work out; we have a role to play to make that come about.

Chinua Achebe

Ours is the country where in order to sell your product you don't so much point out its merits as you first work like hell to sell yourself.

Louis Kronenberger

The have influence, but no power.""In my experience, influence is power.

Orson Scott Card

... all his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that something had happened which really deserved a face, he had none to celebrate it with. As a kind of token, he made his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face.

Kingsley Amis

To feel that one has a place in life solves half the problem of contentment.

George E. Woodberry

Silence is one great art of conversation.

William Hazlitt

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

I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely.

Lee Siegel

They’re so brave," she said. "They’re all dead." "Only a coward would think of that," she said scornfully.

Orson Scott Card

When are you going to get a fella?" Lily asks Rose after a year or two of dancing. "I have one who wants to take me kissing, but I think I should wait for you to have one."Rose flushes. "I don't think I'll ever have a fella.""Why not?" Lily bristles. "We're plenty pretty.""I don't like the look of them," Rose says.Lily purses her lips at the dance floor, appraising.After a moment long, Rose says, "Any of them."Lily looks at her a long time, as Rose tries not to hyperventilate.Then Lily shrugs and says, "Well, then it's you who should have learned to lead, isn't it?" and when Rose clasps Lily's hand, she clasps it back.It's the closest they've ever been.

Genevieve Valentine

There are two kinds of Europeans: The smart ones, and those who stayed behind.

H.L. Mencken

A few alligators are naturally of the vicious type and inclined to resent it when you prod them with a stick. You can find out which ones these are by prodding them.

Will Cuppy

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.

H.L. Mencken

Ender had come to feel a unity so strong that the word we came to his lips much more easily than I.

Orson Scott Card

A strong passion for any object will ensure success for the desire of the end will point out the means.

William Hazlitt

I am only a beer teetotaller not a champagne teetotaller.

George Bernard Shaw

In the country whereto I goI shall not see the face of my friendNor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses;Together we shall not findThe land on whose hills bends the new moonIn air traversed of birds.What have I thought of love?I have said, "It is beauty and sorrow."I have thought that it would bring me lost delights, and splendorAs a wind out of old time . . .But there is only the evening here,And the sound of willowsNow and again dipping their long oval leaves in the water.-- from "Betrothed

Louise Bogan

Do not shout at me, Mr. Quill," said John [Adams]. "Justice may be blind, but she is not deaf.

Orson Scott Card

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. . . . And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money. I Corinthians xiii (adapted)

George Orwell

If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement.

Orson Scott Card

We must have the courage to be happy.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

George Bernard Shaw

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

H.L. Mencken

How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?”Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said.“Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?...

George Orwell

...she was sensitive enough and intelligent enough to understand, and her literary education could not but have sharpened her perception of the evidence before her eyes: that in the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of post-colonial African societies two people starting off even as identical twins in the morning might quiet easily find themselves in the evening one as President shitting on the heads of the people and the other a nightman carrying the people's shit in buckets on his head.

Chinua Achebe

The risen Christ! Once morefaith is upon us, a jubilant brief keeningwith respite:Obedience, bitter joy,the elements, clouds,winds, louvres where the bellmakes its wild mouths:Holy Rus – into the rain’shorizons, peacock-dyed tail feathers of storm,so it goes on.

Geoffrey Hill

Canada was settled in the main by people with a lower middle-class outlook and a respect rather than an affectionate familiarity for the things of the mind.

Robertson Davies

O’Brien: How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?Winston: By making him suffer.O’Brien: Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but MORE merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred.

George Orwell

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

George Orwell

You haven't lived until you died in New York.

Alexander Woollcott

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

Joyce Carol Oates

And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?’ ‘To make them confess.’ ‘No, that is not the reason. Try again.’ ‘To punish them.’ ‘No!’ exclaimed O’Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. ‘No! Not merely to extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that?

George Orwell

He had a reputation in society as a man with a lively wit, whose gaiety was pleasant and formidable – which all gaiety must be in a society which would despise you if, while amusing it, you did not make it tremble a little. ("A Woman's Vengeance")

Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

In order not to make a liar out of Henry or Katherine, one or the other, the committee men think up circumstances in which the match may have been partly consummated, or somewhat consummated, and to do this they have to imagine every disaster and shame that can occur between a man and a woman alone in a room in the dark.

Hilary Mantel

Each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the foundation of the world.

William Dean Howells

The wretchedness of being rich is that you live with rich people.

Logan Pearsall Smith

On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence.

John Updike

Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.

Joyce Carol Oates

Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy.

Richard Davenport-Hines

HIGGINS. The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

George Bernard Shaw

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton you may as well make it dance.

George Bernard Shaw

As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human being writing human literature to a human audience.

Orson Scott Card

There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.

Orson Scott Card

Nor do I like being told upsetting news—unless there is a good reason. I can’t help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions.

Joyce Carol Oates

Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.

H.L. Mencken

education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.

Kingsley Amis

Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.

George Bernard Shaw

Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.

George Bernard Shaw

The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.

Hilary Mantel

Words are the only things that last for ever.

William Hazlitt

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.

George Bernard Shaw

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of it's process.

Henry James

He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.

William Hazlitt

Morality is not respectability.

George Bernard Shaw

A great devotee of the gospel of getting on.

George Bernard Shaw

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