Quotes by Critics - Page 52

Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
Robertson Davies
No two persons ever read the same book.
Edmund Wilson
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
Robertson Davies
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight
Ezra Pound
Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
Ezra Pound
I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.
George Gissing
Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound
Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.
Hilary Mantel
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
George Orwell
Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
By deciding that they would study only that which could be verified under controlled conditions, they had merely limited their field of endeavor. Most truth lay outside the neat confines of science....
Orson Scott Card
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad hoc plot device.
David Langford
Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
Terry Eagleton
Science never solves a problem without creating ten more
George Bernard Shaw
The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.
H.L. Mencken
My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative evolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating me shall suggest that I accepted the tenets peculiar to any established church or denomination nor take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacr
George Bernard Shaw
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
Clive James
Alvin smiled back, and kissed her. "People talk about fools counting chickens before they hatch. That's nothing. We name them.
Orson Scott Card
I kicked, shouted an obscene word, got another faceful of goo for my troubles, and did the only thing left available to me. I started to laugh. This was a stupid way to die, all right. But also a god damned funny one.
Adam-Troy Castro
As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud, with their nostrils barely protruding into the air of common-sense. They happily tolerated the existence of opinions contrary to their own — they even, for God’s sake, sometimes changed their minds. Their pathetic attempts at profundity were qualified out of existence and largely interrogative in mode. They liked to begin a paper with some formula like, ‘I want to raise some questions about so-and-so’, and seemed to think they had done their intellectual duty by merely raising them. This manoeuvre drove Morris Zapp insane. Any damn fool, he maintained, could think of questions; it was answers that separated the men from the boys.
David Lodge
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
H.L. Mencken
Ethan Wyeth: I hope you're thirsty."Gideon Wyeth:"Why?"Ethan: "Cause your dumb and ugly, but I can do something about thirsty.
Orson Scott Card
By deciding that they would study only that which could be verified under controlled conditions, they had merely limited their field of endeavor. Most truth lay outside the neat confines of science....
Orson Scott Card
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad hoc plot device.
David Langford
Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
Terry Eagleton
Science never solves a problem without creating ten more
George Bernard Shaw
The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.
H.L. Mencken
My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative evolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating me shall suggest that I accepted the tenets peculiar to any established church or denomination nor take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacr
George Bernard Shaw
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
Clive James
Alvin smiled back, and kissed her. "People talk about fools counting chickens before they hatch. That's nothing. We name them.
Orson Scott Card
I kicked, shouted an obscene word, got another faceful of goo for my troubles, and did the only thing left available to me. I started to laugh. This was a stupid way to die, all right. But also a god damned funny one.
Adam-Troy Castro
As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud, with their nostrils barely protruding into the air of common-sense. They happily tolerated the existence of opinions contrary to their own — they even, for God’s sake, sometimes changed their minds. Their pathetic attempts at profundity were qualified out of existence and largely interrogative in mode. They liked to begin a paper with some formula like, ‘I want to raise some questions about so-and-so’, and seemed to think they had done their intellectual duty by merely raising them. This manoeuvre drove Morris Zapp insane. Any damn fool, he maintained, could think of questions; it was answers that separated the men from the boys.
David Lodge
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
H.L. Mencken
Ethan Wyeth: I hope you're thirsty."Gideon Wyeth:"Why?"Ethan: "Cause your dumb and ugly, but I can do something about thirsty.
Orson Scott Card
Before she continued her search she sat in his revolving desk chair, and wept for the passing of time, and the necessary death of the well-loved, wise old man.
Robertson Davies
And there was that trick he did with time, making it speed up when we were together and drag til I saw him again.
Francine Prose
And there is neither beginning nor end, nor past nor future; there is only a present, at the same time static and ephemeral, multiple and absolute. It is the vital ocean in which we all share, according to our strength, our needs or our desires.
Rémy de Gourmont
How much time? Not as much as I had yesterday.
Orson Scott Card
...you seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making mistakes and prove how smart you are to the other students. This is such a pointless, stupid way of listening to teachers that it is clear you are going to waste months of our time before you finally catch on that the only transaction that matters is a transfer of useful information from adults who possess it to children who do not, and that catching mistakes is a criminal misuse of time.
Orson Scott Card
For when I trace back the years I have liv'd, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer'd Work Of Nature my life has been. If I were now to inscribe my own History with its unparalleled Sufferings and surprizing Adventures (as the Booksellers might indite it), I know that the great Part of the World would not believe the Passages there related, by reason of the Strangeness of them, but I cannot help their Unbelief; and if the Reader considers them to be but dark Conceits, then let him bethink himself that Humane life is quite out of the Light and that we are all Creatures of Darknesse.
Peter Ackroyd
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ...
Louis Hector Berlioz
The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.
Orson Scott Card
I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind... At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme, I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves.
Robertson Davies
The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
Henry James
The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.
Joyce Carol Oates
And that's what we'll do every day. If you or your friends spray-paint obscenities on our walls, we'll scrub them off, and the people will come. if you break our windows, we'll fix them, and the people will come. If you hurt us, we'll wash off the blood, slap on some bandages and the people will come...any wound you inflict, we'll stitch up. We're not going to stop, no matter what you do. This work is too important. Too many lives are at stake.
Robert J. Wiersema
But what I knew then was that nobody-not even my mother-was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself in the surface.
Robertson Davies
A wise man once said that the best definition of insanity was performing the same action over and over again, expecting different results."Father Peter stopped smiling. "The same could be said of you. What makes you so sure you're right? And so sure I'm wrong?""The difference is that I made a mistake once, out of ignorance," Tim said. "Everything I've done since then has been to try to make amends.""To earn forgiveness.""To protect the innocents." Tim smiled, "And yes, to earn forgiveness.
Robert J. Wiersema
Those who are made can be unmade.
Hilary Mantel
No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.
Orson Scott Card
There's only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore you.
Orson Scott Card
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.
George Bernard Shaw
Something must bevery wrong,' it said,and I agreed,although it turned outthe author meant that 'no theoryof physics should produceinfinities with impunity.'I’d point out that every theoryof the heartproduces infinitieswith impunityif I were the kind of jerkwho uses the heartto mean the humantendency to makeothers sufferjust because wehate to sufferalone. I’m sorryI brought a fitted sheetto the beach. I’m sorry I’m selfish and determinedto make the worstof everything. I’msorry language is a ship that goes downwhile you’re building it.The Hesychasts of Byzantiumstripped their prayersof words. It’s been triedwith poems too. But insofaras I am a disappointment to myself and others, it seems fittingto set up shop in almost and not quite and that’s not what I meant. I draw the line at the heart,though, with itsinfinities.
Michael Robbins
The greater part of a men who speak ill of women are speaking of a certain woman.
Rémy de Gourmont
I knew her so well that I loved her, or maybe I loved her so well that I knew her. I didn't want to fight her anymore. I wanted to quit. I wanted to go home. So I blew up her planet.
Orson Scott Card
I don't know," she said. "We used to squabble a lot when we were going together and then engaged and everything, but I thought everything would be so different as soon as you were married. And now I feel so sort of strange and everything. I feel so sort of alone.
Dorothy Parker
The women we really love are the women who complete us, who have the qualities we can borrow and so become something nearer to whole men. Just as we complete them, of course; it’s not a one-way thing. Leola and I, when romance was stripped away, were too much alike; our strengths and weaknesses were too nearly the same. Together we would have doubled our gains and our losses, but that isn’t what love is.
Robertson Davies
The thing about her is, she’s good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they’re a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature.
John Updike
Love affairs are for emotional sprinters the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.
Robertson Davies
Miro, I'm so sorry. I always felt such pity for you humans because you could only think of one thing at a time and your memories were so imperfect and . . . now I realize that just getting through the day without killing somebody can be an achievement."It gets to be a habit. Most of us manage to keep our body count quite low. It's the neighborly way to live.
Orson Scott Card