Critic Quotes

It makes the plant neither more nor less interesting that it smells sweet or stings; but the dispassionate interest of the botanist is often accompanied by the purely human pleasure in the beauty of the flower.

Back o'er the deep I turn my longing eyes,
And chide the wayward passions that rebel:
Yet boots it not to think, or to complain,
Musing sad ditties to the reckless main.
To dreams like these, adieu! the pealing bell
Speaks of the hour that stays not—and the day
To life's sad turmoil calls my heart away.

William Lisle Bowles

Let a single completed action, all in one place, all in one day, keep the theatre packed to the end of your play.

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

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.

There once was an old man of Lyme
Who married three wives at a time,
When asked 'Why a third?'
He replied, 'One's absurd!
And bigamy, Sir, is a crime!'

William Cosmo Monkhouse

At about six in the morning of July 3, 1860, while I was watering my petunias, and thinking of nothing in particular, I perceived coming towards me, a tall, beardless, fair-haired young fellow, wearing a German cap and gold-rimmed spectacles.

Edmond François Valentin About

Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement.

Any photographer worth his/her salt - that is, any photographer of professional caliber, in control of the craft, regardless of imagistic bent - can make virtually anything look good. Which means, of course, that she or he can make virtually anything look bad - or look just about any way at all. After all, that is the real work of photography: making things look, deciding how a thing is to appear in the image.

Not only is he not a genius; he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.

Only the heel
Of splendid steel
Shall stand secure on sliding fate,
When golden navies weep their freight.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

The word "Silence" today sounds "bridegroom" or the "tragedy of love".

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.

Though the clown is often deadpan, he is a connoisseur of laughter.

The Orphic Machine is the poem: a severed head with face turned away that sings.

Legends are best left as legends and attempts to make them real are rarely successful

Michael Moorcock

We are getting to be of an age when it is difficult to grow new friends; we haven't the energy, the time to cultivate; each one gone is a permanent impoverishment.

Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend.

Sometimes, the shortest path between two points is serpentine,

Christopher Benfey

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

Kathryn Lindskoog

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

Margo Jefferson

Drinking good wine with good food in good company is one of life's most civilized pleasures.

Michael Broadbent

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

There is no such thing as an absolute truth to be discovered.

On me, on me
Time and change can heap no more!
The painful past with blighting grief
Hath left my heart a withered leaf.
Time and change can do no more.

Richard Henry Horne