Quotes by Critics - Page 56

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.
George Orwell
My love runs by like a day in June, And he makes no friends of sorrows. He'll tread his galloping rigadoon In the pathway of the morrows. He'll live his days where the sunbeams start, Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart, -- And I wish somebody'd shoot him.
Dorothy Parker
It costs me never a stab nor squirm / To tread by chance upon a worm. / Aha, my little dear, / I say, Your clan will pay me back one day.
Dorothy Parker
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
Randall Jarrell
Speak against unconscious oppression,Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,Speak against bonds.
Ezra Pound
We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.
Mary McCarthy
Is Dust immortal then, I ask'd him, so that we may see it blowing through the Centuries? But as Walter gave no Answer I jested with him further to break his Melancholy humour: What is Dust, Master Pyne?And he reflected a little: It is particles of Matter, no doubt.Then we are all Dust indeed, are we not?And in a feigned Voice he murmered, For Dust thou art and shalt to Dust return. Then he made a Sour face, but only yo laugh the more.
Peter Ackroyd
Mostly I couldn't bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead.
Gail Caldwell
...every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.
George Orwell
I have kept thee long in waiting, dear Romuald, and thou mayst well have thought that I had forgotten thee. But I have come from a long distance and from a place from which no one has ever before returned; there is neither moon nor sun in the country from which I come; there is naught but space and shadow; neither road nor path; no ground for the foot, no air for the wing; and yet here I am, for love is stronger than death, and it will end by vanquishing it. Ah! what gloomy faces and what terrible things I have seen in my journeying! What a world of trouble my soul, returned to this earth by the power of my will, has had in finding its body and reinstating itself therein! What mighty efforts I had to put forth before I could raise the stone with which they had covered me! See! the palms of my poor hands are all blistered from it. Kiss them to make them well, dear love!
Théophile Gautier
I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
George Orwell
As she cried, I could feel growing there, as had once before, a presence between us: the tiny perfect form of Sherry nestled between her parents' bodies. Our bodies were shaped by her absence, by the almost unbearable weight of her loss.
Robert J. Wiersema
The TriflerDeath's the lover that I'd be taking;Wild and fickle and fierce is he.Small's his care if my heart be breaking-Gay young Death would have none of me.Hear them clack of my haste to greet him!No one other my mouth had kissed.I had dressed me in silk to meet him-False young Death would not hold the tryst.Slow's the blood that was quick and stormy,Smooth and cold is the bridal bed;I must wait till he whistles for me-Proud young Death would not turn his head.I must wait till my breast is wilted.I must wait till my back is bowed,I must rock in the corner, jilted-Death went galloping down the road.Gone's my heart with a trifling rover.Fine he was in the game he played-Kissed, and promised, and threw me over,And rode away with a prettier maid.
Dorothy Parker
I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love.
Orson Scott Card
Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?
John Updike
No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
Al Álvarez
They had...finished their lives before their death – which is not always the end of life and often comes long before the end.
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old.
George Orwell
It was not right, thought Han Fei-tzu, for his wife to die before him: her ancestor-of-the-heart had outlived her husband. Besides, wives should live longer than husbands. Women were more complete inside themselves. They were also better at living in their children. They were never as solitary as a man alone.
Orson Scott Card
A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there is no self to die.
Bernard Berenson
You may remember that on earth—though of course we never confessed it—the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.
George Bernard Shaw
While death and darkness girdle meI grope for immortality.
Lionel Pigot Johnson
So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
George Orwell
The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.
Gail Caldwell
Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.
Meghan O'Rourke
What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.
Meghan O'Rourke
I'll have that someday, thought Peter. Someone who'll kiss me good-bye at the door. Or maybe just someone to put a blindfold over my head before they shoot me. Depending on how things turn out.
Orson Scott Card
The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it.
Gail Caldwell
Death is just the last scene of the last act.
Joyce Carol Oates
Death has this much to be said for it:You don't have to get out of bed for it.Wherever you happen to beThey bring it to you—free.
Kingsley Amis
Life is a predicament which precedes death.
Henry James
From too much love of livingFrom hope and fear set free,We thank with brief thanksgivingWhatever gods may beThat no life lives for ever;That dead men rise up never;That even the weariest riverWinds somewhere safe to sea.Then star nor sun shall waken,Nor any change of light:Nor sound of waters shaken,Nor any sound or sight:Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,Nor days nor things diurnal;Only the sleep eternalIn an eternal night.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Today will die tomorrow.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
I waited for dawn, but only because I had forgotten how hard mornings were. For a second I'd be normal. Then came the dim awareness of something off, out of place. Then the truth came crashing down and that was it for the rest of the day. Sunlight was reproof. Shouldn't I feel better than I had in the dead of night.
Francine Prose
Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.
Meghan O'Rourke
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
H.L. Mencken
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
George Bernard Shaw
But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.
George Orwell
Now I want you to remember something because I don't think we shall meet again very soon. It is this; however fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however powerful despair may become in the future, not everybody, or even most people, think and live fashionably; virtue and honour will not be banished from the world, however many popular moralists and panicky journalists say so. Sacrifice will not cease to be because psychiatrists have popularized the idea that there is often some concealed, self-serving element in it; theologians always knew that. Nor do I think love as a high condition of honour will be lost; it is a pattern in the spirit, and people long to make the pattern a reality in their own lives, whatever means they take to do so. In short, Davey, God is not dead. And I can assure you God is not mocked.
Robertson Davies
Uncertainty is the refuge of hope.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Mind led bodyto the edge of the precipice.They stared in desireat the naked abyss.If you love me, said mind,take that step into silence.If you love me, said body,turn and exist.
Anne Stevenson
Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.
Gail Caldwell
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing
Raymond Williams
A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?
Joyce Carol Oates
I have hope for you, if only because you're the only one left to hope for.
Orson Scott Card
I thought: hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.
Lu Xun
Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.
Joyce Carol Oates
...so Leola thought that a modest romance with a hero in embryo could do no harm - might even be a patriotic duty.
Robertson Davies
Whatever may have been said of the satiety of pleasure and of the disgust which usually follows passion, any man who has anything of a heart and who is not wretchedly and hopelessly blasé feels his love increased by his happiness, and very often the best way to retain a lover ready to leave is to give one's self up to him without reserve.
Théophile Gautier
Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life
Joyce Carol Oates
Gradually, we have become each other's weather.
Paul Zweig
No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
H.L. Mencken
De temps à autre, il est bon de faire une pause dans notre quête du bonheur et d'être simplement heureux.
Guillaume Apollinaire
I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.
Hilary Mantel
Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman.
George Gissing
For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?
Joyce Carol Oates
The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound.The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
George Bernard Shaw
It was a pity that people did not risk enough to speak out in behalf of one another's happiness and their own.
Louis Zukofsky
Money is made at Christmas out of holly and mistletoe, but who save the vendors would greatly care if no green branch were procurable? One symbol, indeed, has obscured all others--the minted round of metal. And one may safely say that, of all the ages since a coin first became the symbol of power, ours is that in which it yields to the majority of its possessors the poorest return in heart's contentment.
George Gissing
The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
George Bernard Shaw