Quotes by Critics - Page 32

Of all my failures to offset the mortification of wanting, expecting, or caring too much, the most humiliating was having no real answer for the love of a good man. It humbled me.
Michelle Orange
She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ...
John Updike
This level reach of blue is not my sea; Here are sweet waters, pretty in the sun,Whose quiet ripples meet obediently A marked and measured line, one after one. This is no sea of mine. that humbly laves Untroubled sands, spread glittering and warm. I have a need of wilder, crueler waves; They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm. So let a love beat over me again, Loosing its million desperate breakers wide; Sudden and terrible to rise and wane; Roaring the heavens apart; a reckless tide That casts upon the heart, as it recedes, Splinters and spars and dripping, salty weeds.
Dorothy Parker
But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life
Renata Adler
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
To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without - our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them - the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of light and sound - processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven by many forces; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them - a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flame-like our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.
Walter Pater
I have not betrayed Julia.
George Orwell
When she says margarita she means daiquiri.When she says quixotic she means mercurial.And when she says, "I'll never speak to you again,"she means, "Put your arms around me from behindas I stand disconsolate at the window."He's supposed to know that.When a man loves a woman he is in New York and she is in Virginiaor he is in Boston, writing, and she is in New York, reading,or she is wearing a sweater and sunglasses in Balboa Park and he is raking leaves in Ithacaor he is driving to East Hampton and she is standing disconsolateat the window overlooking the baywhere a regatta of many-colored sails is going onwhile he is stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway.When a woman loves a man it is one ten in the morningshe is asleep he is watching the ball scores and eating pretzelsdrinking lemonadeand two hours later he wakes up and staggers into bedwhere she remains asleep and very warm.When she says tomorrow she means in three or four weeks.When she says, "We're talking about me now,"he stops talking. Her best friend comes over and says,"Did somebody die?"When a woman loves a man, they have goneto swim naked in the streamon a glorious July daywith the sound of the waterfall like a chuckleof water rushing over smooth rocks,and there is nothing alien in the universe.Ripe apples fall about them.What else can they do but eat?When he says, "Ours is a transitional era,""that's very original of you," she replies,dry as the martini he is sipping.They fight all the timeIt's funWhat do I owe you?Let's start with an apologyOk, I'm sorry, you dickhead.A sign is held up saying "Laughter."It's a silent picture."I've been fucked without a kiss," she says,"and you can quote me on that,"which sounds great in an English accent.One year they broke up seven times and threatened to do it another nine times.When a woman loves a man, she wants him to meet her at the airport in a foreign country with a jeep.When a man loves a woman he's there. He doesn't complain that she's two hours lateand there's nothing in the refrigerator.When a woman loves a man, she wants to stay awake.She's like a child cryingat nightfall because she didn't want the day to end.When a man loves a woman, he watches her sleep, thinking:as midnight to the moon is sleep to the beloved.A thousand fireflies wink at him.The frogs sound like the string sectionof the orchestra warming up.The stars dangle down like earrings the shape of grapes.
David Lehman
Every word that he had spoken amongst the amassed beauties of Macmaster furnishings had been a link in a love-speech. It was not merely that he had confessed to her as he would have to no other soul in the world - 'To no other soul in the world,' he had said! - his doubts, his misgivings, and his fears; it was that every word he uttered and that came to her, during the lasting of that magic, had sung of passion. If he had uttered the word 'Come', she would have followed him to the bitter ends of the earth; if he had said, 'There is no hope', she would have known the finality of despair. Having said neither, she knew: 'This is our condition; so we must continue!' And she knew, too, that he was telling her that he, like her, was… oh, say, on the side of the angels.
Ford Madox Ford
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
John Updike
The official erasure of any existence before enslavement – as if black Americans did not exist before the yolk and the chains and whip – has always created a passion for us.Black people need to find out. We have to find out Who We Are and Where We Come From.
Bonnie Greer
So often I'm like, No, thanks, to all of that stuff, just give me the room to exist both in the shit and stars . . . We have to fight to be understood as being distinct and incongruent. But I think it is worth fighting for.
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah
Valuing names as they do, Realists are sparing with them. They are likely to be known only as Joe or Bill or Plato. And they don't smile much. Nominalists have more fun. They are known as Aristotle or Decimus-et-Ultimus Barziza, or as Edward John Barrington Douglas-Scott-Montague, or perhaps by one name in childhood and several others in the course of life. A firm Realist misses out on one of the most satisfying of all human activities -- the assumption of secret identities. A man who has lived and never been someone else has never lived. It is true that occasionally there can be embarrassment in secret identities, but only a Realist will take the whole thing seriously enough to hit you. So have your fun, and avoid Realists.
Alexei Panshin
The gap that was created during those transatlantic voyages hundreds of years ago.That gap is the matrix of Saudade – The Longing, I think, that all Africans in the West have, that is at the root of the blues and jazz and soul and rap. If you listen you can hear it, elusive, fleeting, full of melancholy anger.
Bonnie Greer
There are varieties of life unknown to you.Their whole identity is: you can't find out.
Dan Chiasson
Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be. She thought of that, worried about it for a few days, and then wrote a column using that as a premise, to show that politicians who toadied to the Russians in order to keep the peace would inevitably end up subservient to them in everything.
Orson Scott Card
Human beings *do* metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered.
Orson Scott Card
The reason that extended solitude seemed so hard to endure was not that we missed others but that we began to wonder if we ourselves were present, because for so long our existence depended upon assurances from them.
Doris Grumbach
England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.
George Orwell
Valentine went back to class without answering. That night Demosthenes published a scathing denunciation of the population limitation laws. People should be allowed to have as many children as they like, and the surplus population should be sent to other worlds, to spread mankind so far across the galaxy that no danger, no invasion could ever threaten the human race with annihilation. "The most noble title any child can have," Demosthenes wrote, "is Third.
Orson Scott Card
With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.
Orson Scott Card
Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.
Orson Scott Card
And even those who claim to read the Bible literally and to lead their lives according to its precepts are, in actual practice, highly selective about which parts of the Bible they live by and which they don't. Jesus' condemnations of wealth and war are generally ignored; so are Levitical prohibitions on eating pork, wearing mixed fabrics and so forth. Though legalistic Christians accuse nonlegalistic Christians of selective interpretation and relativistic morality (of adjusting the Bible, in short, to suit their own lifestyles and prejudices), what is usually happening is that nonlegalists are, as the Baptist tradition puts it, reading the Bible with Jesus as their criterion, while the legalists are, without any philosophical consistency whatsoever, embracing those laws and doctrines that affirm their own predilections and prejudices and ignoring the rest.
Bruce Bawer
Whence but from heaven, could men unskilled in arts,In several ages born, in several parts,Weave such agreeing truths? Or how, or why, Should all conspire to cheat us with a lie?
John Dryden
I agree with Proust in this, he says, that books create their own silences in ways that friends rarely do. And the silence that grows palpable when one has finished a canto of Dante, he says, is quite different from the silence that grows palpable when one has reached the end of Oedipus at Colonus. The most terrible thing that has happened to people today, he says, is that they have grown frightened of silence. Instead of seeking it as a friend and as a source of renewal they now try in every way they can to shut it out... the fear of silence is the fear of loneliness, he says, and the fear of loneliness is the fear of silence. People fear silence, he says, because they have lost the ability to trust the world to bring about renewal. Silence for them means only the recognition that they have been abandoned... How can people find the strength to be happy if they are so terrified of silence?
Gabriel Josipovici
Words were his delight; Hers, a gay gracefulnessOf dancing and moving. But when to the place Of deep loving (Starlight at midnight)At last they came, Their full communion And consummation,Their complete sphere,Was stillness for her,Silence for him.
Theodore Spencer
He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure.
Henry James
The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence.
Rémy de Gourmont
[T]here's a thin line separating the delicate from the bloodless, in art as in food.
Amit Chaudhuri
All foreign food is doomed to be consumed in India not so much by Indians as by a voracious Indian sensibility, which demands infinite versions of Indian food, and is unmoved by difference.
Amit Chaudhuri
In any case, muffins that are only imaginary aren't liable to get stuck.
Thomas M. Disch
A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion....Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market gardeners.
George Orwell
The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.
George Bernard Shaw
What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.
Hilary Mantel
A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs.
Hilary Mantel
Sometimes lies are more dependable than the truth.
Orson Scott Card
When I consider Life, 'tis all a cheat;Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit;Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay:To-morrow's falser than the former day;Lies worse; and while it says, we shall be blestWith some new joys, cuts off what we possesst.
John Dryden
Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’."(on Lillian Hellman)
Mary McCarthy
Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn’t hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.
Orson Scott Card
The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out: 'Swine! Swine! Swine!', and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen.
George Orwell
Poke had never shared out so many raisins, because she had never had so many to share. But the little kids wouldn't understand that. They'd think, Poke gave us garbage, and Achilles gave us raisins. That's because they were stupid.
Orson Scott Card
Nothing but the natural ignorance of the public, countenanced by the inoculated erroneousness of the ordinary general medical practitioners, makes such a barbarism as vaccination possible.......Recent developments have shown that an inoculation made in the usual general practitioner's light-hearted way, without previous highly skilled examination of the state of the patient's blood, is just as likely to be a simple manslaughter as a cure or preventive. But vaccination is nothing short of attempted murder. A skilled bacteriologist would just as soon think of cutting his child's arm and rubbing the contents of the dustpan into the wound, as vaccinating it in the same.
George Bernard Shaw
For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian──ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection that unattainable by the highest art.
Lytton Strachey
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
Nations, like men, are wary of truth, for truth is too often not beautiful.
Addison Gayle Jr.
A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.
William Hazlitt
Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.
George Bernard Shaw
The beautiful is powerless but always exceeds what frames it, and what always frames it is discourse.
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.
George Orwell
For till the thunder and trumpet be,Soul may divide from body, but not weOne from another
Algernon Charles Swinburne
It has not been a successful life.''No -- it has only been a beautiful one.
Henry James
Good-nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all the virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition.
William Hazlitt
Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man; thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)’ Humbly to expressA penitential loneliness.
Thomas de Quincey
Cats and monkeys - monkeys and cats - all human life is there!
Henry James
To his inner ear, the cardinal speaks. He says, I saw you, Crumb, when you were at Elvetham: scratching your balls in the dawn and wondering at the violence of the king’s whims. If he wants a new wife, fix him one. I didn’t, and I am dead.
Hilary Mantel
Tears flow and smiles fade to the same rhythm of life, to disappear together in the bottomless abyss.
Rémy de Gourmont
If you help them (the crew) create good memories, they'll forget all the bad stuff
Geoff Dyer
I am old enough now to have all the memories of my people locked within my head. I remember things that happened long before I was born. I remember things that never happened at all. I live in memory. –Anton
Orson Scott Card
And so the picture that I showed her that Sunday, a picture I'd seen countless times since I was a boy, brought home to me for the first time the strangeness of my relationship to the people I was interviewing, people who were rich in memories but poor in keepsakes, whereas I was so rich in the keepsakes but had no memories to go with them.
Daniel Mendelsohn
All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side . . . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them
George Orwell