Quotes by Literary Critics - Page 2

Greed like the love of comfort is a kind of fear.
Cyril Connolly
I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure as a test of value.
Rebecca West
The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
Cyril Connolly
Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds even if it is the salt of the earth.
Rebecca West
To accept a favor from a friend is to confer one.
John Churton Collins
There is a definite process by which one made people into friends and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.
Rebecca West
My life seems to have become suddenly hollow and I do not know what is hanging over me. I cannot even put the shadow that has fallen on me into words. At least into written words. I would give a great deal for a friend's voice.
John Addington Symonds
That daily life is really good one appreciates when one wakes from a horrible dream or when one takes the first outing after a sickness. Why not realize it now?
William Lyon Phelps
The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.
Cyril Connolly
The world like an accomplished hostess pays most attention to those whom it will soonest forget.
John Churton Collins
The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
George Steiner
Tell me who admires and loves you and I will tell you who you are.
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Nothing succeeds like failure.
Rebecca West
Sometimes a noble failure serves the world as faithfully as a distinguished success.
Edward Dowden
This indeed is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature-that without passion little gets done yet without control of that passion its effects are largely ill or null.
F.L. Lucas
We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
Northrop Frye
Arrogance pedantry and dogmatism are the occupational diseases of those who spend their lives directing the intellects of the young.
Henry S. Canby
All charming people have something to conceal usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
Cyril Connolly
Things have a terrible permanence when people die.
Joyce Kilmer
The critic is an overgoer with pen-envy.
Geoffrey Hartman
It is not expected of critics that they should help us to make sense of our lives they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.
Frank Kermode
The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
Charles Du Bos
Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.
Cyril Connolly
A ceremony of self-wastage - good talkers are miserable they know that they have betrayed themselves that they have taken material which should have a life of its own to disperse it in noises upon the air.
Cyril Connolly
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues. That is all.
Rebecca West
The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
Northrop Frye
Americans like to make money: Canadians like to audit it. I know no country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.
Northrop Frye
Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics.
Northrop Frye
There has never been a war of Canadian origin nor for a Canadian cause.
William Arthur Deacon
We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.
Northrop Frye
Our country has shown a lack of will to resist its own disintegration .. . Canada is practically the only country left in the world which is a pure colony colonial in psychology as well as in mercantile economics.
Northrop Frye
One appreciates that daily life is really good when one wakes from a horrible dream or when one takes the first outing after a sickness. Why not realize it now?
William Lyon Phelps
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
Northrop Frye
One of the recognizable features of the authentic masterpiece is its capacity to renew itself to endure the loss of some kinds of immediate relevance while still answering the most important questions men can ask including new ones they are just learning how to frame.
Arnold Stein
The fear of life is the favorite disease of the twentieth century.
William Lyon Phelps
America should care more for its poor and reform itself in other ways but even if it won't do those things it remains the least constrained society on earth.
Robert M. Adams
Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
Northrop Frye
The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence to be always calm ... to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
Cyril Connolly
The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man.
George Steiner
Our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derived precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago.
Stephen Greenblatt
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
Roland Barthes
One day, of course, no one will remember what I remember.
Donald Hall
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
Friedrich Schlegel
An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit.
Samuel R. Delany
The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.
Harold Bloom
Here's the most startling irony I know in film history: Antonioni, who is often denigrated by left-wing critics as a formalist and aesthete gives us radical realism through the long take, and what he gives us--this is his metaphysical wager--is real outside the film, off the set, beyond the camera and underneath the surface of everyday life.
Frank Lentricchia
No one can be the total cure for another person.
Frank Lentricchia
The camera has a mind of its own--its own point of view. Then the human bearer of time stumbles into the camera's gaze--the camera's domain of pristine space hitherto untraversed is now contaminated by human temporality. Intrusion occurs, but the camera remains transfixed by its object. It doesn't care. The camera has no human fears.
Frank Lentricchia
Cinema is a mixed form. L'Avventura has characters, it has social context, and these things are not trivial. Its plot is the disappearance of a disappearance. Possibly the most frightening plot imaginable. Forgetting the dead, whom all of history tells us we must remember. But what makes movies themselves, rather than novels or plays, is something else. What is it if not the film medium itself? The purity of the visual, which lies in the silence of the stilled image. The freeze frame. The deeply, deeply silent image. Like death. The image in itself in its silent purity reaches--it reaches!--for the purity of death.
Frank Lentricchia
In the end, everything is found to be wanting.
Frank Lentricchia
I want to die, stripped, by myself, of all fantasies. That's the goal. I want to feel what is real, at the end, and only what is real. Grip fiercely with my eyes all that is around me--the people of my intimate life, the objects in the room, without the evasions of fantasies.
Frank Lentricchia
Žižek seems to have got Hitchcock out of his system, if not out of his unconscious—one never does that.
Fredric Jameson
It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and spending, the typical American college student lays waste his powers. Work and contemplation don't mix, and university days ought to be days of contemplation.
Russell Kirk
When we were in bed, the only part of me she touched was my penis, because it was the most detached.
Anatole Broyard
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, "age-old pastime of humanity".
Roland Barthes
My students should be afraid: choosing what kind of work you'll do to a great extent means choosing who you'll be.
Maureen Corrigan
Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.
Maureen Corrigan
One can be enlightened about proofs as well as theorems. Without enlightenment, one is merely reduced to memorizing proofs. With enlightenment about a proof, its flow becomes clear and it can become an item of astonishing beauty. In addition, the need to memorize disappears because the proof has become part of your soul.
Herbert S. Gaskill
It is an unfortunate fact that proofs can be very misleading. Proofs exist to establish once and for all, according to very high standards, that certain mathematical statements are irrefutable facts. What is unfortunate about this is that a proof, in spite of the fact that it is perfectly correct, does not in any way have to be enlightening. Thus, mathematicians, and mathematics students, are faced with two problems: the generation of proofs, and the generation of internal enlightenment. To understand a theorem requires enlightenment. If one has enlightenment, one knows in one's soul why a particular theorem must be true.
Herbert S. Gaskill
Miseries of a birth.
Roland Barthes