Critic Quotes

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

Good work, like good talk or any other form of worthwhile human relationship, depends upon being able to assume an extended shared world.

He that peruses Homer, is like the traveller that surveys mount Atlas; the vastness and roughness of its rocks, the solemn gloominess of its pines and cedars, the everlasting snows that cover its head, the torrents that rush down its sides, and the wild beasts that roar in its caverns, all contribute to strike the imagination with inexpressible astonishment and awe. While reading the Aeneid is like beholding the Capitoline hill at Rome, on which stood many edifices of exquisite architecture, and whose top was crowned with the famous temple of Jupiter, adorned with the spoils of conquered Greece.

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.

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

A woman scorn'd is pitiless as fate,
For then the dread of shame adds stings to hate.

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.

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.

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

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

If the equality of individuals and the dignity of man be myths, they are myths to which the republic is committed.

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.

We demand that people should be true to the pictures we have of them, no matter how repulsive those pictures may be: we prefer the true portrait (as we have conceived it), in all its homogeneity, to one with a detail added which refuses to fit in.

Pamela Hansford Johnson
Pamela Hansford Johnson
Without enthusiasm, the adventurer could never kindle that fire in his followers which is so necessary to consolidate their mutual interests; for no one can heartily deceive numbers who is not first of all deceived himself.

Oh, promise me that some day you and I Will take our love together to some sky Where we can be alone and faith renew, And find the hollows where those flowers grew.

Privacy, after all, was the most relative of privileges. It was granted us by society under ungenerous conditions, the most fundamental of them that whether for pain or profit, by design or accident, we not call public attention to ourselves.

If the soup had been as warm as the wine;
if the wine had been as old as the turkey;
and if the turkey had had a breast like the maid,
it would have been a swell dinner.

Duncan Hines
Duncan Hines
It is science that brings us an understanding of the true complexity of natural systems. The insights from the science of ecology are teaching us how to work with the checks and balances of nature, and encouraging a new, rational, limited-input, environmentally sound means of vineyard management that offers a third way between the ideologically driven approach of Biodynamics and conventional chemical-based agricultural systems.

The cinema gives us a substitute world which fits our desires.

Save it all; you do not know the value things will come to have until the world grows dim around you, and your things —however doubtful in the changing light, things are what you have left. And all you have.

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

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

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

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.

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.