Critic Quotes

You will find many a creature by earth, air, and water, that is more beautiful than a woman.

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

Whether you're an entrepreneur, a small business, or a Fortune 500 company, great marketing is all about telling your story in such a way that it compels people to buy what you are selling. That's a constant. What's always in flux, especially in this noisy, mobile world, is how, when, and where the story gets told, and even who gets to tell all of it.

Gary Vaynerchuk
Gary Vaynerchuk
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.

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.

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

Frederick Crews
Frederick Crews
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.

Norman Spinrad
Norman Spinrad
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.

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.

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.

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.

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