Quotes by Critics

…So when the last and dreadful hourThis crumbling pageant shall devour,The trumpet shall be heard on high,The dead shall live, the living die,And Music shall untune the sky
John Dryden
I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.
Joyce Carol Oates
The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.
Joyce Carol Oates
For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.
Joyce Carol Oates
It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed—to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis!
Joyce Carol Oates
It may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. It may be that these tears can never be removed. And everywhere the odor of melancholy, that is the very odor of memory.
Joyce Carol Oates
Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers—their dread of what was imminent in their lives, their false hopes, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge; you would not wish to hear echoes of their whispered exchanges—But he was looking so well yesterday, what has happened to him overnight—
Joyce Carol Oates
It is the most horrific thought—my husband died among strangers.
Joyce Carol Oates
Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism.
Joyce Carol Oates
Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad—I could not bear to “outlive” them—for to be a daughter without parents did not seem possible to me.
Joyce Carol Oates
The minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our lives, it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events.
Joyce Carol Oates
The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!
Joyce Carol Oates
Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity.
Joyce Carol Oates
That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can’t confront it.
Joyce Carol Oates
How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray—here? Is it possible that he won’t be coming home with me in another day or two, as we’d planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It’s like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it.
Joyce Carol Oates
She will speculate that she didn’t fully know her husband—this will give her leverage to seek him, to come to know him. It will keep her husband “alive” in her memory—elusive, teasing.
Joyce Carol Oates
Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely—perhaps never—furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you’ve ruined both our lives.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
How exhausted I am suddenly!—though this has been Ray’s best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling—almost—exhilarated.
Joyce Carol Oates
She seemed to be lovely still to herself, as if no amount of looking into mirrors could ruin her illusion.
Elizabeth Taylor
Derrida… labels as ‘metaphysical’ any such thought system which depends on an unassailable foundation, a first principle or unimpeachable ground upon which a whole hierarchy of meanings may be constructed. It is not that he believes that we can merely rid ourselves of the urge to forge such first principles, for such an impulse is deeply embedded in our history, and cannot — at least as yet — be eradicated or ignored. Derrida would see his own work as inescapably ‘contaminated’ by such metaphysical thought, much as he strives to give it the slip. But if you examine such first principles closely, you can see that they may always be ‘deconstructed’: they can be shown to be products of a particular system of meaning, rather than what props it up from the outside.
Terry Eagleton
Any landscape is a condition of the spirit.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
...but you drank your black coffee by choice, believeng that Paris was sufficient alcohol.
Malcolm Cowley
Night came on, the lamps were lighted, the tables near him found occupants, and Paris began to wear that peculiar evening look of hers which seems to say, in the flare of windows and theatre-doors, and the muffled rumble of swift-rolling carriages, that this is no world for you unless you have your pockets lined and your scruples drugged.
Henry James
In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
Terry Eagleton
Oh ParisFrom red to green all the yellow dies awayParis Vancouver Hyeres Maintenon New York and the AntillesThe window opens like an orangeThe beautiful fruit of light("Windows")
Guillaume Apollinaire
In Rome the statues, in Paris the paintings, and in Prague the buildings suggest that pleasure can be an education.
Caleb Crain
The nation had had two symbols of solitude, the forest and the prairies; now it had a third, the mountains.
Bernard DeVoto
Reality isn’t the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we’re engineered for it. It’s a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can’t tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. Nothing it was designed to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function.
Theodore Sturgeon
Insecurity of the spirit demands completeness elsewhere.
Peter Ackroyd
We are the dead . Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone.
George Orwell
I owe all my originality, such as it is, to my determination not to be a literary man. Instead of belonging to a literary club I belong to a municipal council. Instead of drinking and discussing authors and reviews, I sit on committees with capable practical greengrocers and bootmakers... Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh.
George Bernard Shaw
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
And I was a Child again, watching the bright World. But the Spell broke when at this Juncture some Gallants jumped from the Pitt onto the Stage and behaved as so many Merry-Andrews among the Actors, which reduced all to Confusion. I laugh'd with them also, for I like to make Merry among the Fallen and there is pleasure to be had in the Observation of the Deformity of Things. Thus when the Play resumed after the Disturbance, it was only to excite my Ridicule with its painted Fictions, wicked Hypocrisies and villainous Customs, all depicted with a little pert Jingle of Words and a rambling kind of Mirth to make the Insipidnesse and Sterility pass. There was no pleasure in seeing it, and nothing to burden the Memory after: like a voluntarie before a Lesson it was absolutely forgotten, nothing to be remembered or repeated.
Peter Ackroyd
Beer gurgled through the beard. 'You see,' the young man began, 'the desert's so big you can't be alone in it. Ever notice that? It's all empty and there's nothing in sight, but there's always something moving over there where you can't quite see it. It's something very dry and thin and brown, only when you look around it isn't there. Ever see it?''Optical fatigue -' Tallant began.'Sure. I know. Every man to his own legend. There isn't a tribe of Indians hasn't got some way of accounting for it. You've heard of the Watchers? And the twentieth-century white man comes along, and it's optical fatigue. Only in the nineteenth century things weren't quite the same, and there were the Carkers.''You've got a special localized legend?''Call it that. You glimpse things out of the corner of your mind, same like you glimpse lean, dry things out of the corner of your eye. You incase 'em in solid circumstance and they're not so bad. That is known as the Growth of Legend. The Folk Mind in Action. You take the Carkers and the things you don't quite see and put 'em together. And they bite.'Tallant wondered how long that beard had been absorbing beer. 'And what were the Carkers?' he prompted politely.'Ever hear of Sawney Bean? Scotland - reign of James the First or maybe the Sixth, though I think Roughead's wrong on that for once. Or let's be more modern - ever hear of the Benders? Kansas in the 1870's? No? Ever hear of Procrustes? Or Polyphemus? Or Fee-fi-fo-fum?'There are ogres, you know. They're no legend. They're fact, they are. The inn where nine guests left for every ten that arrived, the mountain cabin that sheltered travelers from the snow, sheltered them all winter till the melting spring uncovered their bones, the lonely stretches of road that so many passengers traveled halfway - you'll find 'em everywhere. All over Europe and pretty much in this country too before communications became what they are. Profitable business. And it wasn't just the profit. The Benders made money, sure; but that wasn't why they killed all their victims as carefully as a kosher butcher. Sawney Bean got so he didn't give a damn about the profit; he just needed to lay in more meat for the winter.'And think of the chances you'd have at an oasis.''So these Carkers of yours were, as you call them, ogres?''Carkers, ogres - maybe they were Benders. The Benders were never seen alive, you know, after the townspeople found those curiously butchered bodies. There's a rumor they got this far West. And the time checks pretty well. There wasn't any town here in the 80s. Just a couple of Indian families - last of a dying tribe living on at the oasis. They vanished after the Carkers moved in. That's not so surprising. The white race is a sort of super-ogre, anyway. Nobody worried about them. But they used to worry about why so many travelers never got across this stretch of desert. The travelers used to stop over at the Carkers, you see, and somehow they often never got any further. Their wagons'd be found maybe fifteen miles beyond in the desert. Sometimes they found the bones, too, parched and white. Gnawed-looking, they said sometimes.''And nobody ever did anything about these Carkers?''Oh, sure. We didn't have King James the Sixth - only I still think it was the First - to ride up on a great white horse for a gesture, but twice there were Army detachments came here and wiped them all out.''Twice? One wiping-out would do for most families.'Tallant smiled at the beery confusion of the young man's speech.'Uh-huh, That was no slip. They wiped out the Carkers twice because you see once didn't do any good. They wiped 'em out and still travelers vanished and still there were white gnawed bones. So they wiped 'em out again. After that they gave up, and people detoured the oasis.("They Bite")
Anthony Boucher
Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.
Hilary Mantel
How strange it (the earthquake) must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the way!
William Dean Howells
The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.
George Orwell
In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.
William H. Gass
The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
John Updike
So now I lye by Day and toss or rave by Night, since the ratling and perpetual Hum of the Town deny me rest: just as Madness and Phrensy are the vapours which rise from the lower Faculties, so the Chaos of the Streets reaches up even to the very Closet here and I am whirl'd about by cries of Knives to Grind and Here are your Mouse-Traps. I was last night about to enter the Shaddowe of Rest when a Watch-man, half-drunken, thumps at the Door with his Past Three-a-clock and his Rainy Wet Morning. And when at length I slipp'd into Sleep I had no sooner forgot my present Distemper than I was plunged into a worse: I dreamd my self to be lying in a small place under ground, like unto a Grave, and my Body was all broken while others sung. And there was a Face that did so terrifie me that I had like to have expired in my Dream. Well, I will say no more.
Peter Ackroyd
This is a little parable about cities and genres; how, while some of them lose their imaginative centrality, others take their place.
Amit Chaudhuri
Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms tastes and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity.
John Jay Chapman
Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations he's only trying on one face after another till he finds his own.
Logan Pearsall Smith
It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own it simply erases your own experience in history.
Renata Adler
It's all that the young can do for the old to shock them and keep them up to date.
George Bernard Shaw
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound
Whatever we conceive well we express clearly.
Nicolas Boileau
Truth forever on the scaffold wrong forever on the throne.
James Russell Lowell
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell
A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language trying to get human feelings right.
John K. Hutchens
There is nothing more dangerous to the formation of a prose style than the endeavour to make it poetic.
J. Middleton Murry
The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.
Robertson Davies
It is in the hard rockpile labour of seeking to win hold or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing comes in.
John Mason Brown
Every word she writes is a lie including 'and' and 'the'.
Mary McCarthy
Every author however modest keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.
George Bernard Shaw
I think with my right hand.
Edmund Wilson
A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed in keeping rabbits.
Edith Sitwell
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say and then to say it with the utmost levity.
George Bernard Shaw