Quotes by Literary Critics - Page 2

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

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

Roland Barthes

(Love’s atopia, characteristic which causes it to escape all dissertations, would be that *ultimately* it is possible to talk about love only *according to a strict allocutive determination*; whether philosophical, gnomic, lyric, or novelistic, there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom one addresses, though this person may have shifted to the condition of a phantom or a creature still to come. No one wants to speak of love unless it is *for* someone.).

Roland Barthes

Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful.

Harold Bloom

A rural Venus, Selah rises from thegold foliage of the Sixhiboux River, sweepspetals of water from her skin. At once,clouds begin to sob for such beauty.Clothing drops like leaves."No one makes poetry,my Mme.Butterfly, my Carmen, in Whylah,”I whisper. She smiles: “We’ll shape it withour souls.”Desire illuminates the dark manuscriptof our skin with beetles and butterflies.After the lightning and rain has ceased,after the lightning and rain of lovemakinghas ceased, Selah will dive again into thesunflower-open river.

George Elliott Clarke

Poems are difficult to silence.

Stephen Greenblatt

Like overzealous religious converts, climbers originally from the lower rungs of society tend to go overboard when they ape the upper class.

Maureen Corrigan

No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

Harold Bloom

I transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing.

Roland Barthes

murder your darlings

Arthur Quiller-Couch

I was assigned to the office of a recently deceased faculty member; the office hadn't been cleaned out yet, and a few days before the fall term began, I unlocked the door to find a dirty room whose bookshelves were crammed with empty bourbon bottles and crucifixes, mute testimony to the limits of literature as a sustaining comfort in life.

Maureen Corrigan

For the Bible there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence, within nature itself. Nature is a fellow creature of man.

Northrop Frye

I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.

Harold Bloom

This view of literature as an aesthetic object that could make us ‘better people’ is linked to a certain idea of the subject, to what theorists have come to call ‘the liberal subject’, the individual defined not by a social situation and interests but by an individual subjectivity (rationality and morality) conceived as essentially free of social determinants.

Jonathan Culler

Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.

Harold Bloom

Worship is not love.

Donald Hall

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap it consoles it distracts it excites it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Elizabeth Hardwick

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

Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.

Roland Barthes

I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.

Maureen Corrigan

I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (apology of this mortiferous power: certain Communards paid with their lives for their willingness or even their eagerness to pose on the barricades: defeated, they were recognized by Thiers's police and shot, almost every one).

Roland Barthes

Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.

Cyril Connolly

Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist.

Samuel R. Delany

The critic is an overgoer with pen-envy.

Geoffrey Hartman

The finder of his theme will be at no loss for words.

J.V. Cunningham

Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.

Rebecca West

A library is never -- for lovers of the written word -- simply a place for conserving or storing books but rather a sort of living creature with a personality and even moods which we should understand and learn to live with.

Francisco Márquez Villanueva

Miseries of a birth.

Roland Barthes

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

George Steiner

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

M.H. Abrams

[Charlotte Bronte] had thought of every maneuver for circumventing those stony obstructions of wives who would not remove themselves.

Elizabeth Hardwick

The experience of death is going to get more and more painful, contrary to what many people believe. The forthcoming euthanasia will make it more rather than less painful because it will put the emphasis on personal decision in a way which was blissfully alien to the whole problem of dying in former times. It will make death even more subjectively intolerable, for people will feel responsible for their own deaths and morally obligated to rid their relatives of their unwanted presence. Euthanasia will further intensify all the problems its advocates think it will solve.

René Girard

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

Roland Barthes

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we learn to walk.

Cyril Connolly

The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man.

George Steiner

We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.

Harold Bloom

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

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

One day, of course, no one will remember what I remember.

Donald Hall

And his left nipple was centimetres above my right eye. I wanted to lean my head back and lick it – not from desire but from that idiocy always there to subvert desire and render it ludicrous. Our human heat was a third creature bevelling between us.

Samuel R. Delany

Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

Roland Barthes

Normalization takes place not because there is Western-ideology that normalizes third-world texts in any special way (other than the usual play with exoticism) but because this academic seeks to domesticate everything, even Marx.

Aijaz Ahmad

[Books are] vital to learning. Half the population don't go to football matches but that doesn't make football any less important.

John Sutherland

If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens. If, still putting all your trust in Knowledge, you try to dodge the difficulty by specialising, you produce a brain bulging out inordinately on one side, on the other cut flat down and mostly paralytic at that: and in short so long as I hold that the Creator has an idea of a man, so long shall I be sure that no uneven specialist realises it. The real tragedy of the Library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.... but we may agree that, in reading, it is not quantity so much that tells, as quality and thoroughness of digestion.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.

Harold Bloom

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living': so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don't stay still, so life-writing can't be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shifting about what can be said, our knowledge of human character is changing. The biographer has to pioneer, going 'ahead of the rest of us, like the miner's canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions'. So, 'There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation'. She is talking about the story of Shelley, but she could be talking about her own life-story. (Virginia Woolf, p. 11)

Hermione Lee

We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.

George Steiner

Night thoughts have a different color than day thoughts, a different slant, more than anything else they know all the secret paths and chinks in the armor they can take advantage of to force their way into consciousness.

Christa Wolf

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

Harold Bloom

Depth of understanding involves something which is more than merely a matter of deconstructive alertness it involves a measure of interpretative charity and at least the beginnings of a wide responsiveness.

Stefan Collini

Everybody knows that. The missing step is always the next.

Óscar Lopes

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.

Roland Barthes

Criticism demands infinitely more culture than artistic creation.

Pierre Bayard

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

Roland Barthes

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

Harold Bloom

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

Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely.

Rebecca West

Many animals flourish not in spite of the fact that they are "animals" but because they are "animals"—or even more precisely, perhaps, because they are felt to be members of our families and our communities, regardless of their species. And yet, at the very same moment, billions of animals in factory farms, many of whom are very near to or indeed exceed cats and dogs and other companion animals in the capacities we take to be relevant to standing (the ability to experience pain and suffering, anticipatory dread, emotional bonds and complex social interactions, and so on), have as horrible a life as one could imagine, also because they are "animals."Clearly, then, the question here is not simply of the "animal" as the abjected other of the "human" tout court, but rather something like a distinction between bios and zoe that obtains within the domain of domesticated animals itself.

Cary Wolfe

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

Roland Barthes

Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.

Edward Said

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