Quotes by Literary Scholars

The English of the Bible has a pithiness and raciness a homely tang a terse sententiousness an idiomatic flavour which comes home to men's business and bosoms ... a nobility of diction and ... a rhythmic quality . . . unrivaled in its beauty.
John Livingston Lowes
There’s no happy ending ... Nevertheless, we might well say that is exactly Harriet Beecher Stowe’s point. In 1852 slavery had not been abolished. Slaves were still on the plantations and many of them were in the hands of people like Legree. Her book was written to shame the collective conscience of America into action against an atrocity which was still continuing. So a happy ending would have been, frankly, a lie and a betrayal. ...Most of the charges are basically true. Stowe did stereotype. She did sentimentalize. She offered a role model which later offended African American pride. On the other hand, what she did worked. She wasn’t trying to provide a role model for African Americans. She was trying to make white Americans ashamed of themselves. ...Perhaps the short answer to her critics is to ask, “Do you want glory, approval, all those good things? Or do you want to achieve your goal?
Thomas A. Shippey
Fairy tales are experienced by their hearers and readers, not as realistic, but as symbolic poetry.
Max Luthi
Mannerism, especially when it takes the form of recurrent word or phrase, is by no means easy to represent; there is but a hair's breadth between the point at which the reader delightfully recognizes is as a revealing habit of speech, and the point at which its iteration begin to weary him.
Mary Lascelles
Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.
Paul Fussell
If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
Paul Fussell
Today, Chanel sells nothing other than its griffe; the griffe is an absolute symbol for 'fashion' which, having become historical, is now able to sell this history better than it could sell fashion. Chanel's lasting success proves that fashion has become self-referential: the fetish of the mere name shows how it has begun to revolve around itself. The House of Chanel produces what Coco most abhorred: a thing of the past, dead. The visible, outwardly displayed griffe has become the opposite of individualized style: instead it confirms the latent uniform collectivity, which had always defined Chanel-wear; in the end, it signifies membership of an expensive club. The Chanel woman does not want to display her own taste, she wants to belong. In order to be certain, she is laden with Chanel signs and accessories, like amulets to protect against the evil eye; on the pocket, on the belt, on the dress buttons, on the watch, on costume jewelry, proudly stand the initials of the founder of the house, to which she knows she belongs.
Barbara Vinken
Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.
Paul Fussell
The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not be controlled nor put to sleep. In a poet this must often be the visual imagination, bringing before his eyes a succession of images which he never summoned, and of which some (it is only too likely) will be ugly or pitiful.
Mary Lascelles
Maupassant is a man of mitigating circumstances, the lawyer who can bring the jurors around by demonstrating that they too could have committed such a crime. We are all murderers.
Philippe Lejeune
A story conducted by the time of a clock and calendars alone would be a story not of human beings but of mechanical toys.
Mary Lascelles
A clever girl may pass through the phase of foolish miss on the way to sensible woman.
Mary Lascelles
Lie to yourself, not to someone else
H.F. Stewart
The mortality rate of literary friendships is high. Writers tend to be bad risks as friends ~ probably for much the same reasons that they are bad matrimonial risks. They expend the best parts of themselves in their work. Moreover, literary ambition has a way of turning into literary competition; if fame is the spur, envy may be a concomitant.
Matthew J. Bruccoli
When many story-tellers occupy themselves with a social world which offers no great variety of lively action, their stories will probably resemble one another as to many of the major incidents, and if they draw on these limited resources like spend thrifts such resemblances will be inevitable--and therefore not significant.
Mary Lascelles
He challenged the world with his genius, and the world defeated him by ignoring the challenge and starving him. He stopped writing because he had failed and because he had no choice but to accept the world’s terms: there is no mystery here. This was not insanity, but common sense.
Raymond Weaver
The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask tobe imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.
Paul Fussell
i find nothing more depressing than optimism.
Paul Fussell
Language is the medium of literature, and the state of the language at any time can hardly fail to carry literary consequences.
J.A. Burrow
Literature takes us away from our grey everyday experience, but brings us back enriched with new sensibilities.
Willie van Peer
Landscapes we must owe something to the eye of the beholder.
Mary Lascelles
The implicit optimism of the [field service post card] is worth noting—the way it offers no provision for transmitting news like “I have lost my left leg” or “I have been admitted into hospital wounded and do not expect to recover.” Because it provided no way of saying “I am going up the line again,” its users had to improvise. Wilfred Owen had an understanding with his mother that when he used a double line to cross out “I am being sent down to the base,” he meant he was at the front again. Close to brilliant is the way the post card allows one to admit to no state of health between being “quite” well, on the one hand, and, on the other, being so sick that one is in hospital.
Paul Fussell
The world became informed about the extent of the catastrophe and the losses by the big powers eclipsed the numbers of Estonias who perished. When counting Hitler's victims there was no interest in Stalin's victims. Stalin belonged among the victors. Since victors are not judged, a half century later it is still ignored that the number of Stalin's victims exceeds Hitler's (Applebaum 2003). In addition, only rarely does one hear references to the fact that Soviet union0s criminal acts have not been expiated.
Rutt Hinrikus
It would be narrowness to suppose that an artist can only care for the impressions of those who know the methods of his art as well as feel its effects. Art works for all whom it can touch.
Gordon S. Haight
The nature of a work of art is to be not a part, nor yet a copy of the real world but a world in itself, independent, complete, autonomous; and to possess it fully you must enter that world, conform to its laws, and ignore for a time the beliefs, aims, and particular conditions which belong to you in the other world of reality.
A.C. Bradley
If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.
Paul Fussell
If asked, ‘Do you believe in ghosts or the supernatural?’, I can only answer somewhat as follows. I do believe in another world which penetrates this, and that, as Milton so aptly puts it, ‘Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth/Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep’, I deplore the false Cartesian split as a dreadful blow to the human mind. To me, the world of imagination, which works by means of analogy, is as real, in its own particular way, as the everyday external world. To me, the myths are vital truths, the gods and goddesses still live, on that mighty archetypal plane which lies beyond our little selves and yet within our being, too. Now this may appear illogical, a tangled web of contradictions. To believe in every spiritual truth, in all religions and all creeds, to revere a single God and the many? This may disturb the theologian, but not the Mystic. For, to the mystical turn of mind, the One may become the Many, the Many One. Spiritual and poetic truth—the transcendental vision, that is—encompasses both reason and ethics, yet soars above them.
Harvey Peter Sucksmith
God is the supreme uncreated light of which Wisdom is born, but there was never a time when God's Wisdom did not exist.
Merritt Y. Hughes
Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.
Paul Fussell