American Critic Quotes

My father has always held out Scientology and auditing to be based purely on science and not on religious "belief" or faith. We regularly promised and distributed publications with "scientific guarantees". This was and has always been common practice. My father and I created a "religious front" only for tax purposes and legal protection 'from fraud Claims'. We almost always told nearly everyone that Scientology was really science, not a religion, but that the religious front was created to deal with the government.

Like every great tradition, my family had to die before I could understand how much I missed them and what they meant to me. When they went into the flames at the crematorium, all my letters of introduction went with them.

Anatole Broyard

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course.

Now we all know that new recordings carry Danger signs all over them. Danger: fantastic sound can subvert your judgement. Danger: artist's names and reputations can affect the way we listen. Danger: a new recording has not had time to win you over—it may be unfair to compare it to one you have known for 20 years. [...] Danger: things that irritate now may endear themselves to us in time. Danger: there was only one Stokowski.

I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were right and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions.

Form, color, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which... can be dispensed with.

Harold Rosenberg

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.

How do you make a small fortune in the wine business? Start with a large fortune and buy a winery.

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

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

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

Frederick Crews

Reptilian green the wrinkled throat,
Green as a bough of yew the beard;
He bent his head, and so I smote

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