Quotes by Critics - Page 6

The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.

Rémy de Gourmont

Devise some creed, and live it, beyond theirs,Or I shall think you but their spendthrift heirs.

Edmund Blunden

The childish urge to understand everything doesn't necessarily fade when the time approaches for you to do the most adult thing of all: vanish.

Clive James

In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.

George Orwell

What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast.

Olivia Laing

Big Brother is watching you.

George Orwell

How much time? Not as much as I had yesterday.

Orson Scott Card

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.

Terry Eagleton

he writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated lo neliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

Renata Adler

Most writers deserve the reputation posterity has bestowed upon them: You can’t for long conceal the toxic spots on your character—Philip Larkin is Exhibit A—nor can you conceal your dignity, your humanism, your regard for veracity and freedom.

William Giraldi

To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.

William Hazlitt

A woman who is found without her veil in some regions of Islam will it is reported raise her skirt to cover her face.

Raymond Mortimer

Excellence is inconveniently difficult.

William H. Gass

Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge.... Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.

Robertson Davies

Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it....

George Bernard Shaw

Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.

Walter Kirn

All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.

George Orwell

Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.

Henry James

As a matter of fact, when it comes to seeing, men display two tendencies: they see what they wish to see, what is useful to them, what is agreeable. The second is the tendency toward inhibition; they do not see what they do not wish to see, what is useless to them, or disagreeable.

Rémy de Gourmont

It has made me better loving you... it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story.

Henry James

If we seek the pleasures of love passion should be occasional and common sense continual.

Robertson Davies

Stories are invented as you go along...

Orson Scott Card

Horse[Man you will find herea new representation of the universeat its most poetic and most modernMan man man man man manGive yourself up to this art where the sublimedoes not exclude charmand brilliancy does not blur the nuanceit is now or never the momentto be sensitive to poetry for it dominatesall dreadfullyGuillaume Apollinaire]

Guillaume Apollinaire

Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

Henry James

It [fiction] allows us to see the world from the point of view of someone else and there has been quite a lot of neurological research that shows reading novels is actually good for you. It embeds you in society and makes you think about other people. People are certainly better at all sorts of things if they can hold a novel in their heads. It is quite a skill, but if you can't do it then you're missing out on something in life. I think you can tell, when you meet someone, whether they read novels or not. There is some little hollowness if they don't.

Philip Hensher

At the time I could not see beyond the moral dilemma that is presented to the weak in a world governed by the strong: Break the rules, or perish.

George Orwell

In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband’s death—his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently—“shrewdly” and “reasonably”—she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection—a “hospital” infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all Widows-to-Be who imagine that they are doing the right thing, in innocence and ignorance!

Joyce Carol Oates

That's what Ender has to understand. There really is evil in the world, and wickedness, and every brand of stupidity. There's meanness and heartlessness and... I don't even know which of them is me." - Hyrum Graff

Orson Scott Card

To a man with only a hammer, a screw is a defective nail.

Orson Scott Card

The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

George Orwell

I need not repeat familiar arguments about the waste of teachers' time, and the difficulties thrown in the way of English children trying to learn their own language; or the fact that nobody without a visual memory for words ever succeeds in spelling conventionally, however highly educated he or she may be.

George Bernard Shaw

You can be rich or deliberately refuse to be rich. You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it

George Orwell

I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you.

George Bernard Shaw

A critic is a legless man who teaches running.

Channing Pollock

Maybe once you've been left by the most important person in your life, you can never be unleft again. Maybe you're destined to be abandoned even by your own guts, maybe your foot walks off with your thighbone, why not, stranger things have happened.

Amy Gentry

He'll be cross if he sees I have been crying. They don't like you to cry. He doesn't cry. I wish to God I could make him cry. I wish I could make him cry and tread the floor and feel his heart heavy and big and festering in him. I wish I could hurt him like hell.He doesn't wish that about me. I don't think he even knows how he makes me feel. I wish he could know, without my telling him. They don't like you to tell them they've made you cry. They don't like you to tell them you're unhappy because of them. If you do, they think you're possessive and exacting. And then they hate you. They hate you whenever you say anything you really think. You always have to keep playing little games. Oh, I thought we didn't have to; I thought this was so big I could say whatever I meant. I guess you can't, ever. I guess there isn't ever anything big enough for that.

Dorothy Parker

Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.

Richard Davenport-Hines

There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.

George Orwell

Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.

George Orwell

It is always hazardous to express what one has to say indirectly and allusively.

Walter Pater

The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

George Bernard Shaw

It's where we go and what we do when we get there that tells us who we are.

Joyce Carol Oates

Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on a bus.

Francine Prose

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.

George Bernard Shaw

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

No man can be satisfied with his attainment although he may be satisfied with his circumstances.

Frank Swinnerton

If someone asks me, “Why do you write?” I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, “Why do you write the way you do?” I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world—every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste.

William H. Gass

What is forgiven is usually well remembered.

Louis Dudek

Those who write ill, and they who ne'er durst write,Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.

John Dryden

But if you caught my informant,' said Achilles, 'why in the world would Chamrajnagar—or Graff, if it was him—launch the shuttle anyway? Was catching me doing something naughty so important they’d risk a shuttle and it’s crew just to catch me? I find that quite… flattering. Sort of like winning the Nobel Prize for scariest villain.

Orson Scott Card

People quickly grow accustomed to being the slaves of mystery.

Guillaume Apollinaire

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.

Joyce Carol Oates

Are you all right, Sir?" asked Hezekiah."Just fighting over old battles in my mind," said John. "It's the problem with age. You have all these rusty arguments, and no quarrel to use them in. My brain is a museum, but alas, I'm the only visitor, and even I am not terribly interested in the displays."Hezekiah laughed, but there was affection in it. "I would love nothing better than to visit there. But I'm afraid I'd be tempted to loot the place, and carry it all away with me.

Orson Scott Card

A journal takes the place of a confidant, that is, of friend or wife; it becomes a substitute for production, a substitute for country and public. It is a grief-cheating device, a mode of escape and withdrawal; but, factotum as it is, though it takes the place of everything, properly speaking it represents nothing at all...

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.

Dmitry Merezhkovsky

What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?

Peter Ackroyd

Home is anywhere that you know all your friends and all your enemies.

Orson Scott Card

All the things I really like to do are either immoral illegal or fattening.

Alexander Woollcott

He runs his eye along the row of knives in their racks, the cleavers for splitting bones. He picks one up, looks at its edge, decides it needs sharpening and says, "Do you think I look like a murderer? In your good opinion?"A silence. After a while, Thurston proffers, "At this moment, master, I would have to say...

Hilary Mantel

Thoughts, pictures of him would come to me just a second after waking, shocking me from the forgetfulness of sleep, striking blows that were almost physical. And even in sleep I was not completely free. So often sleep brought dreams of him.

Bernard Taylor

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