American Critic Quotes

Science fiction … means what we point to when we say it.

The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience - they're inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They're stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie - for any movie - is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up.

The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self.... The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

An art machine is a system
whose parts when put in motion
act upon each other in such a way
as to cause you to see things differently

Film criticism became the means whereby a stream of young intellectuals could go straight from the campus film society into the professionals' screening room without managing to get a glimpse of the real world in between.

It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.

Here, in the company of the mindless trees, the free-flying birds, the bugs and frogs that passed from stimulus directly to response without the interval of consciousness between, did I hope to lose myself in the living mandala of evolution's less self-tortured forms.

Those journeys, with their serendipitous discoveries and misguided side trips, allow us to probe our characters, indulge our passions and prejudices, and finally choose books for which we possess a real affinity.

Ephemerality is the little magazine's generic fate; by promptly dying it gives proof that it remained loyal to its first program.

Frederick Crews

Madness is always fascinating, for it reveals the ungluing we all secretly fear: the mind taking off from the body, the possibility that the magnet that attaches us to a context in the world can lose its grip.

Inner slavery is even worse than outward slavery; and inner freedom is even better than outward freedom.

Kathryn Lindskoog

For manipulation to be most effective, evidence of its presence should be nonexistent... It is essential, therefore, that people who are manipulated believe in the neutrality of their key social institutions.

Herbert Schiller

The man is ugly, the man is evil, and the man is in love. This is gonna be an American classic.

Nothing wholly admirable ever happens in this country except the migration of birds.

Brooks Atkinson

Not so much a film as a visual essay, exquisitely directed and photographed (by Sacha Vierny)... Difficult to watch but well worthwhile for those willing to be challenged.

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood.

John Mason Brown

The sweetest memory is that which involves something which one should not have done; the bitterest, that which involves something which one should not have done, and which one did not do.

George Jean Nathan

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.

Life, if you live it right, keeps surprising you, and the thing that keeps surprising you the most…is yourself

William Deresiewicz

Schools have, or should have, children for six or seven hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for thirteen years or more. To assert that they are powerless to make a significant impact on what their students learn would be to make a claim about American education that few parents, teachers, or students would find it easy to accept.

Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can't imagine you.

Margo Jefferson

The secret of growing younger is counting blessings, not birthdays.

Barbara Johnson

Umm, said Ooo, dubiously.
Do I detect a questioning tone in your voice? inquired the bird tartly. Which might imply that you find a flaw in my reasoning?

Although The Terminator is arguably the more visionary of the first two films, [Terminator 2] is the more visually and viscerally satisfying. It's an exhausting experience and, even 18 years after its release (as I write this review), few films have matched it within the science fiction genre for sheer white-knuckle exhilaration.

James Berardinelli

A poem lies inert, like Sleeping Beauty, until we love it into life.

Norman N. Holland