Quotes by Women Critics

A. S. Byatt

Pauline Kael

Pamela Hansford Johnson

Louise Chandler Moulton

N. Katherine Hayles

Molly Haskell

Margo Jefferson

If Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana were "candles in the wind," and Anna Nicole Smith was a bonfire in a hailstorm, and Lindsay Lohan is an electric toaster thrown intentionally into a Jacuzzi, then Paris Hilton s a strobe light in an epilepsy ward.

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

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.

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

Kathryn Lindskoog

Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.

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.

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

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

Nancy Banks-Smith

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.

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

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.

It is one thing to do your dance on a beach and quite another to collaborate intimately with the sand.

The names of colors are at the edge between where language fails and where it's most powerful.

I dwell no more in Arcady, But when the sky is blue with May, And birds are blithe and winds are free, I know what message is for me, For I have been in Arcady.

Louise Chandler Moulton

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course.

Madness is always fascinating, for it reveals the ungluing we all secretly fear: the mind taking off from the body, the possibility that the magnet that attaches us to a context in the world can lose its grip.

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

Margo Jefferson

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

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

Barbara Johnson

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

Elizabeth Montagu

The bigger question to ask about 300 is why, for a supposedly rousing tale of heroism, it's so curiously unaffecting.

Stephanie Zacharek

The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience - they're inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They're stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie - for any movie - is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up.

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.