Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
20th-century Critic Quotes
Source
Report...
Sometimes, the shortest path between two points is serpentine,
Christopher Benfey
Source
Report...
Nobody seriously questions the principle that it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly nobody in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained.
Robert Warshow
Source
Report...
When a language creates – as it does – a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.
Christopher Ricks
Source
Report...
English literature is a kind of training in social ethics.... English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.
Marilyn Butler
Source
Report...
Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.
Whitney Balliett
Source
Report...
Among the admirable American expressions which enter our language from time to time to lend it new vitality, there is one which I would have every audience, and every lecturer, use at the end of every lecture or course: So what? What does all this amount to.
Thomas Rice Henn
Source
Report...
Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary studies have been slow to wake up to the importance of MSA (media-specific analysis). Literary criticism and theory are shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print. Only now, as the new medium of electronic textuality vibrantly asserts its presence, are these assumptions clearly coming into view.
N. Katherine Hayles
Source
Report...
The Orphic Machine is the poem: a severed head with face turned away that sings.
Allen Grossman
Source
Report...
Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.
C. K. Williams
Source
Report...
Many books today suggest that the mass of women lead lives of noisy desperation.
Peter S. Prescott
Source
Report...
I see fiction not as the construction of an alternate world but as what your imagination gives you from the real world.
Hilton Als
Source
Report...
To see the films coming out of France is to break into a vast treasure and become liberated...
Mick LaSalle
Source
Report...
Art provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully... art becomes our entree to the sublime.
Michael Kimmelman
Source
Report...
The black revolt is as palpable in letters as it is in the streets.
Hoyt W. Fuller
Source
Report...
Not only has photography so thoroughly saturated our visual environment as to make the invention of visual images seem archaic, but it is also clear that photography is too multiple, too useful to other discourses, ever to be wholly contained within traditional definitions of art.
Douglas Crimp
Source
Report...
Perhaps the old literacy of words is dying and a new literacy of images is being born. Perhaps the printed page will disappear and even our records be kept in images and sounds.
Nancy Newhall
Source
Report...
Life, if you live it right, keeps surprising you, and the thing that keeps surprising you the most…is yourself
William Deresiewicz
Source
Report...
Inner slavery is even worse than outward slavery; and inner freedom is even better than outward freedom.
Kathryn Lindskoog
Source
Report...
If we are not to go to pieces or wither away, we all must have some purpose in life; for no man can live for himself alone.
Ross Parmenter
Source
Report...
Never tell a young person that something cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing.
John Andrew Holmes
Source
Report...
The mistake which most critics make is to persist in trying to evaluate pop culture as if it were something else: the equivalent of insisting on considering a bicycle as if it were a horse.
George Melly
Source
Report...
To all who pass that they may see, Rock 'N' Roll was a part of me.
Nik Cohn
Source
Report...
Art itself shuns commonality: while the scientist may seek the phenomenon that repeats itself, the artist seeks the exception.
Dore Ashton
Source
Report...
Greek the language they gave me;
poor the house on Homer's shores.
My only care my language on Homer's shores.
There bream and perch
windbeaten verbs,
green sea currents in the blue.
Odysseus Elytis
Source
Report...
There is no appeal from the ways of the world, which must continue on its own terms or take us all down with it into chaos and confusion.
Mark Van Doren
1
2
3
4
5
Quote of the day
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Related Quotes
19th-century Critics
20th-century Critics
Critic Quotes
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes