Quotes by Critics - Page 35

Madness, and then illumination.
Orson Scott Card
Amatus waited a long time, but at last he broke the silence."There is much I don't unders
John Barnes
I don't think it has anything to do with truth, Olhado. It's just cause and effect. We never can sort them out. Science refuses to admit any cause except first cause-knock down one domino, the one next to it also falls. But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.
Orson Scott Card
In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
Orson Scott Card
The vainglory of wishing to understand is dangerous, immoral and, above all, old-fashioned. The modern way – perhaps the final way - is to say: Go forward, without knowing why, as quickly as possible, towards an unknown goal! To act and think are opposites which identify one only in the Absolute. To accomplish all one's movements – of the head, the arms, the legs – without ever quite attaining the status of a puppet, but with a certainty that gives one a feeling of rightness: that is what is nowadays held up as the ideal. Be citizens of Universal activity! Forget to be conscious of ourselves! The blind horse gallops without hesitation, not knowing where it is going, not caring where it has been: so let up put out our eyes!
Rémy de Gourmont
Those in their snug Bed-chambers may call the Fears of Night meer Bugbears, but their Minds have not pierced into the Horror of the World which others, who are adrift upon it, know.
Peter Ackroyd
Dread is the first and the strongest types of fear. It is that tension, that waiting that comes when you know there is something to fear but you have not yet identified what it is. The fear that comes when you first realize that your spouse should have been home an hour ago; when you realize that a window you are sure you closed is now open, the curtains billowing, and you're alone in the house.Terror only comes when you see the thing you're afraid of. The intruder is coming at you with a knife. The headlights coming toward you are clearly in your lane. The Klansmen have emerged from the bushes and one of them is holding a rope. This is when all the muscles of your body, except perhaps the sphincters, tauten and you stand rigid; or you scream; or you run. There is a frenzy to this moment, a climactic power-but it is the power of release, not the power of tension. And bad as it is, it is better than dread in this respect: Now, at lest, you know the face of the thing you fear. You know its borders, its dimensions. You know what to expect.Horror is the weakest of all. After the fearful thing has happened, you see its remainder, its relics. The grisly, hacked-up corpse. Your emotions range from nausea to pity for the victim. And even your pity is tinged with revulsion and disgust; ultimately you reject the scene and deny its humanity; with repetition, horror loses its ability to move you and, to some degree, dehumanizes the victim and therefore dehumanizes you. As the sonderkommandos in the death camps learned, after you move enough naked murdered corpses, it stops making you want to weep or puke. You just do it. They've stopped being people to you.
Orson Scott Card
He was terrified by the sublime horror of it, for intensity of feeling, carried to this degree, is sublime. ("A Woman's Vengeance")
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
Mere grimness is as easy as grinning; but it requires something to put a handsome face on a story. Narratives become of suspicious merit in proportion as they lean to Newgate-like offenses, particularly of blood and wounds...
Leigh Hunt
Horror, let's face it, is basically pretty dumb. You're writing about events that are preposterous, and the trick is to dress them up in language so compelling that the reader doesn't care.
T.E.D. Klein
There will never be slaves in Britain,' Godalming continued, 'but those who stay warm will naturally serve us, as the excellent Bessie has just served me. Have a care, lest you wind up the equivalent of some damned regimental water-bearer.'In India, I knew a water-bearer who was a better man than most.
Kim Newman
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
John Updike
Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.
George Orwell
To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms.
John Leonard
You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn’t. When the midwife says, ‘It’s a boy,’ where does the girl go? When you think you’re pregnant, and you’re not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines.
Hilary Mantel
Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.
Kingsley Amis
The problem with communication…is the illusion that is has been accomplished.
George Bernard Shaw
…all the evils of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings.
George Orwell
Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings?
George Orwell
Silence rolled at me, in
Joyce Carol Oates
All the habits of Man are evil. And above all, no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal.
George Orwell
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
All things are subject to decay and when fate summons, monarchs must obey.
John Dryden
Come in, Bean." Come in Julian Delphiki, longed-for child of good and loving parents. Come in, kidnapped child, hostage of fate. Come and talk to the Fates, who are playing such clever little games with your life.
Orson Scott Card
In the first play, the crisis is Thomas More. In the second it’s Anne Boleyn. In the third book, and the third play, it’s crisis every day, an overlapping series of only just negotiable horrors. It’s climbing and climbing. Then a sudden abrupt fall - within days.
Hilary Mantel
Tis Fate that flings the dice,And as she flingsOf kings makes peasants,And of peasants kings.
John Dryden
Whatever is, is in its causes just;But purblind manSees but a part o' th' chain; the nearest link;His eyes not carrying to that equal beamThat poises all above.
John Dryden
It's not my fate to give up--I know it can't be.
Henry James
With its grace and carelessness, it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though [all] could be swept into a nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.
George Orwell
Is it considered unadventurous if you really don't feel like doing it? Sometimes I lie awake parcelling out my adventurousness or lack thereof. Should I have done it anyway on the off-chance that something adventurous would happen, and damn the consequences of giving a faulty impression in the process? Can you choose your adventures or does that make them comprised? I think I only take chances when there is a good chance of reward. I may have it all wrong.
Michelle Orange
They were learning that New York had another life, too — subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city — a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses after business hours to talk of work just started or magazines unpublished, and even to lay modest plans for the future. Modestly they were beginning to write poems worth the trouble of reading to their friends over coffee cups. Modestly they were rebelling once more.
Malcolm Cowley
The process of self-invention is never-ending; writer, like children, are always growing into their gifts. (Susan Larson in a "Times-Picayune" book review.
Susan Larson
To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question.
Kingsley Amis
America takes her writers too seriously.
Kingsley Amis
People don't like to talk about alcohol. They don't like to think about it, except in the most superficial of ways. They don't like to examine the damage it does and I don't blame them. I don't like it either. I know that desire for denial with every bone in my body: clavicle, sternum, femur and phalanx.
Olivia Laing
Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. That "writers write" is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers that write at all.
Renata Adler
When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons: Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process. n The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors. n The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well. n Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante’s time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare’s time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how. n Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch. n The starters of crazes.Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees’. He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, but he will never be able to sort out what he knows to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old.He will never understand why a specialist is annoyed with him for trotting out a second- or third-hand opinion about the merits of his favourite bad writer. n
Ezra Pound
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
Literature is language charged with meaning
Ezra Pound
One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
John Updike
The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesn't want to put restraints on "robber barons"-he might become one one day!
Joyce Carol Oates
HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man?DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.
George Bernard Shaw
...we so resented that asshole up there talking talking talking taking up the entire assembly expecting us to believe there isn't a special creation of God, or of man, to which we didn't belong, here in the shabby south end of Hammond in the worst damn public school in the district, we didn't belong and never would. And what the hell? ---Such truths, FOXFIRE made softer.
Joyce Carol Oates
Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life.Do you consider all this desirable? No, I don't. But it may be that the psychological adjustment which the working class are visibly making is the best they could make in the circumstances. They have neither turned revolutionary nor lost their self-respect; merely they have kept their tempers and settled down to make the best of things on a fish-and-chip standard. The alternative would be God knows what continued agonies of despair; or it might be attempted insurrections which, in a strongly governed country like England, could only lead to futile massacres and a regime of savage repression.
George Orwell
The food we were given was no more than eatable, but the patron was not mean about drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each, knowing that if a plongeur is not given two litres he will steal three.
George Orwell
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?
George Orwell
The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her—her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,’ and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.
George Orwell
Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.
George Orwell
It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.
George Orwell
People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such nonsense to pretend that those who have 'come down in the world' are to be pitied above all others.The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start,and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.
George Orwell
This mundus tenebrosus, this shaddowy world of Mankind, is sunk into Night; there is not a Field without its Spirits, nor a City without its Daemons, and the Lunaticks speak Prophesies while the Wise men fall into the Pitte.
Peter Ackroyd
No matter how cheerful and blameless the day’s activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong — you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.
John Updike
A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string.
Chinua Achebe
One thing—one thing exceeds the eternity of the star, he cries, and that is the dark which surrounds it.
William H. Gass
None are so busy as the fool and knave.
John Dryden
You can't do much for the poor, as they are not in with the right people.
Will Cuppy
He says in his defence he never meddled with married women, only with virgins.
Hilary Mantel
There are times when every act, no matter how private or unconscious, becomes political. Whom you live with, how you wear your hair, whether you marry, whether you insist that your child take piano lessons, what are the brand names on your shelf; all these become political decisions. At other times, no act--no campaign or tract, statement or rampage--has any political charge at all. People with the least sense of which times are, and which are not, political are usually most avid about politics. At six one morning, Will went out in jeans and a frayed sweater to buy a quart of milk. A tourist bus went by. The megaphone was directed at him. "There's one," it said. That was in the 1960's. Ever since, he's wondered. There's one what?
Renata Adler
The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her.
Henry James
Do you know why Satan is so angry all the time? Because whenever he works a particularly clever bit of mischief God uses it to serve his own Rigteous purposes.""So God uses wicked people as his tools?""God gives us the freedom to to do great evil, if we choose, then He uses his own freedom to create goodness out of that evil, for that is what He chooses.""So, in the long run, God always wins?""Yes, in the short run though it can be uncomfortable.
Orson Scott Card