Quotes by Critics - Page 5

Now students all seem to be converging on the same self, the successful upper-middle-class professional, impersonating the adult they've already decided they want to become.

William Deresiewicz

I did not know the work of mourningIs like carrying a bag of cementUp a mountain at nightThe mountaintop is not in sightBecause there is no mountaintopPoor Sisyphus griefI did not know I would struggleThrough a ragged underbrushWithout an upward path...Look closely and you will seeAlmost everyone carrying bagsOf cement on their shouldersThat’s why it takes courageTo get out of bed in the morningAnd climb into the day.

Edward Hirsch

They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself

George Orwell

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

Dorothy Parker

It was not right, thought Han Fei-tzu, for his wife to die before him: her ancestor-of-the-heart had outlived her husband. Besides, wives should live longer than husbands. Women were more complete inside themselves. They were also better at living in their children. They were never as solitary as a man alone.

Orson Scott Card

Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature. The most useful place in a house is the lavatory.

Théophile Gautier

Only man clogs his happiness with care destroying what is with thoughts of what may be.

John Dryden

Cats and monkeys - monkeys and cats - all human life is there!

Henry James

Never believe a rumor of my death,' said Peter. 'I have as many lives as a cat. Also as many teeth, as many claws, and the same cheery, cooperative disposition.

Orson Scott Card

Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.

Terry Eagleton

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

George Bernard Shaw

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

I am that which unloves me and loves; I am stricken, and I am the blow.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

A ginooine statesman should be on his guard if he must hev beliefs not to b'lieve 'em too hard.

James Russell Lowell

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.

John Updike

Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.

James Russell Lowell

An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face.

George Orwell

It is true that all of us are the beneficiaries of crimes committed by our ancestors, and it is true that nothing can be done about that now because the victims are dead and the survivors are innocent. These are good reasons for keeping our mouths shut about the past: but tell me, what are our reasons for silence about atrocities still to come?

Damon Knight

How am I, a writer, supposed to feel about having lost you to a reader?

Joshua Cohen

[T]hat's the way of torturers of every age, to put the blame on the victim, especially when he strikes back.

Orson Scott Card

One thinks of the failure of representation since 9/11, the proliferation of novels, the media glut, the surfeit of images that somehow slide too easily into a banal repertoire, commodified shock.

Maureen N. McLane

The real offence as she ultimately perceived was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his - attached to his own like a small garden plot to a deer park.

Henry James

Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.

Malcolm Cowley

The first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western Canada.

T.E. Hulme

A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.

George Bernard Shaw

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

George Bernard Shaw

...every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.

George Orwell

Bambi was inspired, and said trembling, "There is Another who is over us all, over us and over Him.

Felix Salten

At some point, you have to set down the past. At some point, you have to accept that everyone was doing their best. At some point, you have to gather yourself up, and go onward into your life.

Olivia Laing

Traps!" he said. "Never in the world! Don't think it! Why, Gower is just a necessary olf bore. Nobody's supposed to know much about him--except instructors and their hapless students.

Henry Blake Fuller

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

James Russell Lowell

When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone’s thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a “case” with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends.

George Orwell

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

The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weather is that which is woven of conviction.

James Russell Lowell

Night gets its own way in the end. The torches go out, the fire burns down to its internal organs, and the hall is charcoal and darkness.His mind shrinks as the heat dies, a ticking ember.

Matthew Francis

[That wall] might be breached sometime in the future, but for now the only real conversation between them was the roots that had already grown low and deep, under the wall, where they could not be broken.The most terrible thing, though, was the fear that the wall could never be breached, that in his heart Alai was glad of the separation, and was ready to be Ender's enemy. For now that they could not be together, they must be infinitely apart, and what had been sure and unshakable was now fragile and insubstantial; from the moment we are not together, Alai is a stranger, for he has a life now that will be no part of mine, and that means that when I see him we will not know each other.

Orson Scott Card

THE rule for travelling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind us. The object of travelling is to see and learn; but such is our impatience of ignorance, or the jealousy of our self-love, that we generally set up a certain preconception beforehand (in self-defence, or as a barrier against the lessons of experience,) and are surprised at or quarrel with all that does not conform to it. Let us think what we please of what we really find, but pr

William Hazlitt

Penetrating so many secrets we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless calmly licking its chops.

H.L. Mencken

Conquering any difficulty always gives one a secret joy, for it means pushing back a boundary line and adding to one's liberty.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

A cynic is a man who when he smells flowers looks around for a coffin.

H.L. Mencken

You deplore what I did, but you still want to know the results of my research.

Orson Scott Card

Where's the man that could ease a heart like a satin gown?

Dorothy Parker

The theme of invisibility has haunted me for many years, since earliest girlhood. A woman often feels ‘invisible’ in a public sense precisely because her physical being - her ‘visibility’ - figures so prominently in her identity. She is judged as a body, she is ‘attractive’ or ‘unattractive’, while knowing that her deepest self is inward, and secret: knowing, hoping that her spiritual essence is a great deal more complex than the casual eye of the observer will allow… it might be argued that all persons, defined to themselves rather more as what they think and dream than what they do, are ‘invisible’.

Joyce Carol Oates

There is no good arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.

James Russell Lowell

She realizes she doesn't know as much as God but feels she knows as much as God knew when he was her age.

Dorothy Parker

Hawksmoor had often noticed how, in the moments when he first carne upon a corpse, all the objects around it wavered for an instant and became unreal- the trees which rose above a body hidden in woodland, the movement of the river which had washed a body onto its banks, the cars or hedges in a suburban street where a murderer had left a victim, all of these things seemed at such times to be suddenly drained of meaning like an hallucination.

Peter Ackroyd

He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.

John Updike

Hopper’s paintings are full of women like her; women who appear to be in the grips of a loneliness that has to do with gender and unattainable standards of appearance, and that gets increasingly toxic and strangulating with age.

Olivia Laing

We must be doing something to be happy.

William Hazlitt

Like many who'd married in the war, my parents were finding it hard to survive the peace. This wasn't because they had discovered that they didn't love each other once their life together wasn't spiced with constant separations and the threat of death. Far from it. But they hadn't chosen each other so much against the social grain that they were tense, self-conscious, embattled, as though something was supposed to go wrong. Their families didn't like their marriage, nor did the village.

Lorna Sage

At the beginning of the war…I had to look in on the War Office, and in a room I found a fellow…What do you think he was doing…what the hell do you think he was doing? He was devising the ceremonial for the disbanding of a Kitchener battalion. You can’t say we were not prepared in one matter at least…. Well, the end of the show was to be: the adjutant would stand the battalion at ease; the band would play Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant would say: There will be no more parades…. Don’t you see how symbolical it was—the band playing Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant saying: There will be no more parades?…For there won’t. There won’t, there damn well won’t. No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country…nor for the world, I dare say… None… Gone… Napoo finny! No…more…parades!

Ford Madox Ford

Revenge writing is a female genre. Men who have been left by women or made cuckolds by rivals either lick their wounds in humiliated silence or start the Trojan Wars. Having no other power or public voice, the betrayed woman reaches for her pen.

Frances Wilson

Yet the laboriously sought musical epiphany rarely compares to the unsought, even unwanted tune whose ambush is violent and sudden: the song the cab driver was tuned to, the song rumbling from the speaker wedged against the fire-escape railing, the song tingling from the transistor on the beach blanket. To locate those songs again can become, with age, something like a religious quest, as suggested by the frequent use of the phrase "Holy Grail" to describe hard-to-find tracks. The collector is haunted by the knowledge that somewhere on the planet an intact chunk of his past still exists, uncorrupted by time or circumstance.

Geoffrey O'Brien

He seemed to be lying on the bed. He could not see very well. Her youthful, rapacious face, with blackened eyebrows, leaned over him as he sprawled there.“‘How about my present?’ she demanded, half wheedling, half menacing.“Never mind that now. To work! Come here. Not a bad mouth. Come here. Come closer. Ah!“No. No use. Impossible. The will but not the way. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Try again. No. The booze, it must be. See Macbeth. One last try. No, no use. Not this evening, I’m afraid.“All right, Dora, don’t you worry. You’ll get your two quid all right. We aren’t paying by results.“He made a clumsy gesture. ‘Here, give us that bottle. That bottle off the dressing-table.’“Dora brought it. Ah, that’s better. That at least doesn’t fail.

George Orwell

I thought speakers didn't believe in sin," said a sullen boy.Andrew smiled. "You believe in sin, Styrka, and you do things because of that belief. So sin is real in you, and knowing you, this speaker must believe in sin.

Orson Scott Card

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

George Orwell

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Many of the best fantastic stories begin in a leisurely way, set in commonplace surroundings, with exact, meticulous descriptions of an ordinary background, much as in a 'realistic' tale. Then a gradual - or it may be sometimes a shockingly abrupt - change becomes apparent, and the reader begins to realize that what is being described is alien to the world he is accustomed to, that something strange has crept or leapt into it. This strangeness changes the world permanently and fundamentally.

Franz Rottensteiner

In any case, muffins that are only imaginary aren't liable to get stuck.

Thomas M. Disch

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