Critic Quotes

Twinkle, twinkle, little star! How I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky...

When a language creates – as it does – a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.

Christopher Ricks

In holy music's golden speech Remotest notes to notes respond: Each octave is a world; yet each Vibrates to worlds beyond its own.

Aubrey Thomas de Vere

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.

Avant-garde art has become habitual, a dead letter with little spiritual consequence, however materially refined.

It is one of the great charms of books that they have to end.

Greek the language they gave me;
poor the house on Homer's shores.
My only care my language on Homer's shores.
There bream and perch
windbeaten verbs,
green sea currents in the blue.

Odysseus Elytis

Without the striving for infinity there is no life, no development, and no progress.

Vissarion Belinsky

Let there be no mincing of comparisons in this assertion. Not Turner, not Monet, painted so directly blinding shafts of sunlight as has this Spaniard.

Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over-except when they are different.

Nancy Banks-Smith

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.

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.

When I was but thirteen or so
I went into a golden land,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Took me by the hand.

Walter James Redfern Turner

To all who pass that they may see, Rock 'N' Roll was a part of me.

The mistake which most critics make is to persist in trying to evaluate pop culture as if it were something else: the equivalent of insisting on considering a bicycle as if it were a horse.

Flatulency today consists in saying simply in several different ways the same thing over and over again.

Henry Seidel Canby

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.

John Andrew Holmes

Love me little, love me long,
Is the burden of my song.
Love that is too hot and strong
Burneth soon to waste.

John Payne Collier

Art itself shuns commonality: while the scientist may seek the phenomenon that repeats itself, the artist seeks the exception.

The secret of pleasure in life, as distinct from its great triumphs of transcendent joy, is to live in a series of small, legitimate successes. By legitimate I mean such as are not accompanied by self-condemnation.

Sydney Thompson Dobell

There is more suspense, more dramatic torque, in one page of [Nathaniel] Hawthorne's heart-racked ruminations onthe Christian consciencethaninall Demi Moore's woodland gallops and horizontal barn dancing.

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

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.

No writer or speaker who ignores the roots of Latin derivatives is secure from egregious error.

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.