Critic Quotes

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

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

Everyone lies about sex, more or less, to themselves if not to others, to others if not to themselves, exaggerating its importance or minimizing its pull.

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.

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

"How could you love something so destructive?" I ask. "Because this wolf doesn't care if your heart is whole or not," you say. "It tastes just the same."

Jonathan Messinger

The first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise... and cultivate the delightfully vague.

John Crosby (media critic)

Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.

Life, if you live it right, keeps surprising you, and the thing that keeps surprising you the most…is yourself

William Deresiewicz

Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary studies have been slow to wake up to the importance of MSA (media-specific analysis). Literary criticism and theory are shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print. Only now, as the new medium of electronic textuality vibrantly asserts its presence, are these assumptions clearly coming into view.

N. Katherine Hayles

To see the films coming out of France is to break into a vast treasure and become liberated...

I see fiction not as the construction of an alternate world but as what your imagination gives you from the real world.

Many books today suggest that the mass of women lead lives of noisy desperation.

Peter S. Prescott

Art provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully... art becomes our entree to the sublime.

Michael Kimmelman

Perhaps the old literacy of words is dying and a new literacy of images is being born. Perhaps the printed page will disappear and even our records be kept in images and sounds.

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.

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.

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

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.

His thoughts were a loose skein of threads,
And tangled emotions, vague and dim;
And sacrificing what he loved
He lost the dearest part of him

William Braithwaite

The black revolt is as palpable in letters as it is in the streets.

In trying to train the mind to judge of works of architecture, one can never be too patient.

Russell Sturgis

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