Literary Critics

"El hombre no disfruta de los derechos que otros le conceden por la razón, sino de los que él mismo se conquista por la fuerza. Toda libertad nació bañada en sangre, y el advenimiento de la justicia debe compararse con un alumbramiento desgarrador y tempestuoso, no con una germinación tranquila y silenciosa. No aguardamos a que de arriba nos otorguen derechos ni libertades. Del que manda, nunca vino cosa buena ni gratuita, y las naciones que se adormecen confiadas en que la Autoridad se acerque a despertarlas con el don de la independencia son como los insensatos que en el desierto edificaran una ciudad, aguardando que un río viniese a cruzarla por el medio."

"La intelijencia no tiene por qué abdicar ante la fuerza; por el contrario, la voz del hombre razonable i culto debe ser un correctivo a la obra perniciosa de cerebros rudimentarios."

"Si hay placer en conquistar con la espada, no falta dulzura en iluminar con l'antorcha. Gloria por gloria, vale más dejar chispas de luz que regueros de sangre."

"El hombre anda con pasos cortos en la infancia i en la vejez."

"Las revoluciones vienen de arriba y se operan desde abajo. Iluminados por la luz de la superficie, los oprimidos del fondo ven la justicia y se lanzan a conquistarla, sin detenerse en los medios ni arredrarse con los resultados. Mientras los moderados y los teóricos se imaginan evoluciones geométricas o se enredan en menudencias y detalles de forma, la multitud simplifica las cuestiones, las baja de las alturas nebulosas y las confina en terreno práctico. Sigue el ejemplo de Alejandro: no desata el nudo, le corta de un sablazo."

"la forma da el mérito; n'olvidemos que sólo por la forma, el carbono se llama unas veces carbón i otras veces diamante"

"En oposición a los políticos que nos cubrieron de vergüenza y oprobio se levantan los literatos que prometen lustre y nombradía. Después de los bárbaros que hirieron con la espada vienen los hombres cultos que desean civilizar con la pluma."

"Para Manuel González Prada, esta emoción bravía y selecta, una de las que, con más entusiasmo, me ha aplaudido el gran maestro."

"Dada la inclinación general de los hombres al abuso del poder, todo gobierno es malo y toda autoridad quiere decir tiranía"

"Imitar equivale a moverse i fatigarse en el wagón de un ferrocarril: nos imajinamos realizar mucho i no hacemos más que seguir el impulso del motor."

"Si las naciones d'Europa figuran como los grandes paquidermos del reino intelectual, no representemos en el Perú a los microbios de la literatura."

"nuestro poder estriba en la unión: todos los rayos del Sol, difundidos en la superficie de la Tierra, no bastan a inflamar un solo grano de pólvora, mientras unos cuantos haces de luz solar, reunidos en un espejo ustorio, prenden la mina que hace volar al monte de granito."

"Lo que poco cuesta, poco dura. Los libros que admiran i deleitan a la Humanidad, fueron pensados i escritos en largas horas de soledad i recojimiento, costaron a sus autores el hierro de la sangre i el fósforo del cerebro."

"Quien escribe hoi i desea vivir mañana, debe pertenecer al día, a la hora, al momento en que maneja la pluma. Si un autor sale de su tiempo, ha de ser par'adivinar las cosas futuras, no para desenterrar ideas i palabras muertas."

"No arguyan con obstáculos insuperables: el hombre de talento sólido, como el César de buena raza, atraviesa el Rubicón."

"La Ciencia tiene flores inmortales de donde pueden las abejas estraer miel de poesía."

"This is not a man who sits down to "write a poem"; rather, some burden of understanding and feeling, some need to know, forces his poems into being. Thoreau said, "Be it life or death, what we crave is reality." So it is with Carruth. And even in hell, knowledge itself bestows a halo around the consciousness with, at moments, attains it."

"I had always been aware that the Universe is sad; everything in it, animate or inanimate, the wild creatures, the stones, the stars, was enveloped in the great sadness, pervaded by it. [...] Never then or now have I been able to look at a cloudless sky at night and see beauty there."

"The wilderness begins at the edge of my body, at the edge of my consciousness, and extends to the edge of the universe, and it is filled with menace."

"I throw my apple towards you. If you will love me, take it And give me in repayment your own maidenhead: If your will is what I would not, yet keep it still; and make it A lesson of how swiftly all loveliness is fled."

"Pták a cikán doma všude."

"Beside the grey sea-shingle, here at the cross-roads' meeting, I, Hermes, stand and wait, where the windswept orchard grows. I give, to wanderers weary, rest from the road and greeting: Cool and unpolluted from my spring the water flows."

"The more populous the world and the more intricate its structure, the greater must be its fundamental insecurity. A world-structure too elaborately scientific, if once disrupted by war, revolution, natural cataclysm or epidemic, might collapse into a chaos not easily rebuilt."

"Although beneath this grave-mound thy white bones now are lying, Surely, my huntress Lycas, the wild things dread thee still. The memory of thy worth tall Pêlion keeps undying, And the looming peak of Ossa, and Cithæron’s lonely hill."

"I came one-half hour early. My watch [had] gone on a rampage. Lucas [is] a gray-haired man of about 60, [with] finely chiseled features, markedly piercing blue eyes — a look of intelligence and elegance about him — but the elegance is all in his face, not in his clothes. We talked about Bloomsbury. So much of what Lucas said was in quotations — English, French, and German — that I cannot remember or reproduce it. One emphasis he made was that Bloomsbury was a jungle — that the society of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey was far from being in the ordinary sense a happy family. They were intensely and rudely critical of each other. They were the sort of people who would read letters addressed to others. In real crises they could be generous, but in ordinary affairs of life they were anything but kind. He kept insisting that Dickinson and Forster were not really in Bloomsbury. They were softhearted and kind. Bloomsbury was certainly not that. Lucas stayed out of this “jungle.” Also, they tormented each other with endless love affairs. Strachey was openly homosexual — a surprising thing in view of his later relationship with Carrington. Lucas went to Cambridge in 1913 [and] after one year went to war. Returned in 1919. Strachey and the rest were coming into their fame. The notoriety of Eminent Victorians was partly a chance of time and place—the frantic 20s were to assist him no end."

"And how is clarity to be acquired? Mainly by taking trouble; and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them."

"A writer should remember that about his Muse there is a great deal of the Siren. He should view his mental offspring as relentlessly as a Spartan father — if it is not perfectly sound, let it be cast out."

"Criticism is not a science whose elements can be mass-taught to adolescents — it is a difficult art, at which even adults are seldom a notable success. With the young the result is often that they either just regurgitate the judgements they have been taught, or else, if they have a natural and healthy rebelliousness, the opposite of what they have been taught. Thence it is possible to arrive by easy stages at the happy notion, not uncommon among 'intellectuals', that taste consists of distaste, and that the loftiest of pleasures is that of feeling displeased; and thus to end by enjoying almost nothing in literature except one’s own opinions, while oneself incapable of writing a living sentence."

"Most of us know accurately only what we constantly relearn; memory is a dipsomaniac, needing to be perpetually refreshed."

"It seems to me as natural and necessary to keep notes, however brief, of one's reading, as logs of voyages or photographs of one's travels. For memory, in most of us, is a liar with galloping consumption."

"A skill once acquired — for example, the power to speak and write and enjoy one’s own language, or another — is less easily lost, more quickly recovered, than mere accumulations of facts. And it seems to me more important to go out into life able to think straight and communicate clearly than even to know — and remember — the contents of every English book since Caedmon. Then, like Medea, even if you lose everything else, you can still feel 'Myself remains'. Whereas stuffed geese, even if stuffed with the Universe, remain geese."

"On nights when the moon creeps shrouded up the sky And hedge and holt lie glimmering ghostly grey, A voice still whispers in me, far away – A good night, this, for wiring – and suddenly There rises from the dead that shadowy hell, The barbed-wire rasps, uncoiling through my hand, The flares dance flickering over no-man's-land, A dull machine-gun raps from La Boisselle. Then fades the phantom, and once more I know Our spider-webs of wire are rust by now, Our battlefields reconquered by the plough, And hands that worked with mine, dust long ago."

"Among the maggots that breed in the corruption of poetry one of the commonest is the bookworm. When Athens had decayed and Alexandria sprawled, the new giant-city, across the Egyptian sands; when the Greek world was filling with libraries and emptying of poets, growing in erudition as its genius expired, then first appeared, as pompous as Herod and as worm-eaten, that Professorenpoesie which finds in literature the inspiration that life gives no more, which replaces depth by muddiness, beauty by echoes, passion by necrophily."

"In The Waste Land Mr. Eliot has shown that he can at moments write real blank verse; but that is all. For the rest he has quoted a great deal, he has parodied and imitated. But the parodies are cheap and the imitations inferior."

"Paris may pass in gas and flame and blood — We shall sit safe behind our sundering flood. Berlin may build a Holier Inquisition — It will but mean an extra-late edition. Hitler be hailed through all a wrecked Ukraine — We shall just read, and turn to golf again. For God, the day our guardian seas He took, Gave us the broad breast of a Beaverbrook; Round us, though fails the Channel — never fear! — Still lie the stainless depths of Rothermere."

"It is, I believe, personality above all that sets Virgil and Horace higher than Catullus and Ovid; Chaucer than Dryden; Shakespeare than his contemporaries. Many Elizabethans could write at times blank verse as enchanting as his; but he alone could conceive a Hamlet or an Imogen."

"My dream is of a British statesman who could say to his countrymen: "You are sick of war, weary of entanglements. There are some who would have you renounce both. I offer you instead a heavier load of foreign responsibilities, a risk of new war. Because that is the only road to lasting peace. Since the War, British policy has been shuffling, timid, ignoble. Be bold at last, and give a lead to Europe, by offering to form with France and whatever other European states will join, a League within the League, of nations pledged to submit all disputes to the League, but pledged also to fight without hesitation in defence of any member of the group who is attacked. If Germany will join, so much the better; though Germany as she is never will. If America, better still; for the present America is a broken reed. All the more honor for us to accept a responsibility if she refuses."The way will not be easy. We shall often regret the day we pledged ourselves to bear taxation in peace and face death in war for interests and frontiers not our own. But no interest is more really our own than the reign of law between nations."That is little likely to happen. Only an Abraham Lincoln takes risks of that sort with a nation. But this is not because the ordinary politician is wiser; it is because the ordinary politician does not realize the latent force of idealism, all the stronger with the decay of the religions which gave it other outlets, ready in the world of to-day for any leader with the courage to use it; and so easily abused accordingly by the rulers of Moscow and Berlin."

"Considering what was to come, the much-abused 'theft' of the sculptures from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin was an undoubted blessing, though it was carelessly carried out, especially in removing the Caryatid from the Erechtheum; it would none the less be a graceful act for England to return them now to Athens."

"Vitality of mind and body; the activity to employ and maintain them; the zest and curiosity that they can animate; freedom to travel widely in nature and art, in countries of the world and countries of the mind; human affections; and the gift of gaiety – these seem to me, then, the main causes of happiness. I am surprised to find how few and simple they are."

"Many honest folk feel it hard to deny the Sudetens self-determination, if they want to belong to the Reich. But then, can we deny it to the Czech areas among the Sudetens? Then what about Sudeten pockets in the Czech areas? Self-determination must stop somewhere. In politics, as in physics, you come to a point where you cannot go on splitting things. You cannot have self-determination by villages. You may split Czechoslovakia now. In a few years it will be one again. Only it will be German. That is all.What would our own answer be, supposing we were expected on racial grounds to hand over to Berlin our coastal counties from Essex to Northumberland? We should reply that any nation must defend itself against a step which would make it impossible to defend itself.You cannot by any juggling with frontiers abolish racial minorities in Europe. And you cannot totally ignore geography. It follows that where you cannot move mountains you must move men. If the Sudetens are irrevocably set on being in the Reich let them go to the Reich instead of expecting the Reich to come to them. The Germans are the later comers in Bohemia. There are precedents for such an exodus. Good Aryans may disdain to copy Moses, but within these fifteen years just such an exchange of minorities has cured, as nothing else could have cured, the secular hate of Greek and Turk. If a small, poor and barren state like Greece could absorb between one and two million refugees it is absurd to pretend that a great country like Germany, which Hitler has set flowing with milk and honey, could not do as much and more. And if the Czechs can give a home to the persecuted refugees of the Axis, so much the better.This seems to me justice. The alternative is to admit the Trojan Horse into Prague. That may be the sort of fool's wisdom called "expediency"; it is the line of least resistance; but at least let us not cant about its honesty.Undoubtedly Hitler will object. He has other aims. It is not oppression he minds; the loudest yelps about persecution come from the persecutor of the Jews. Czechoslovakia lies on the flank of the German drive to the Black Sea. Therefore, Hitler will not hear reason.A question that vitally affects all Europe should be discussed by Europe. If Hitler foams at the mere mention of the League, let it be a European conference. Only let it give full weight to those smaller Powers which have often a more disinterested sense of decency than their great neighbours. If Hitler refuses he puts himself at once in the wrong. The verdict of such a conference may not convince him; but if he cannot reason, he can count."

"It is unlikely that many of us will be famous, or even remembered. But not less important than the brilliant few that lead a nation or a literature to fresh achievements, are the unknown many whose patient efforts keep the world from running backward; who guard and maintain the ancient values, even if they do not conquer new; whose inconspicuous triumph it is to pass on what they inherited from their fathers, unimpaired and undiminished, to their sons. Enough, for almost all of us, if we can hand on the torch, and not let it down; content to win the affection, if it may be, of a few who know us and to be forgotten when they in their turn have vanished. The destiny of mankind is not governed wholly by its 'stars'."

"Science does not aim to cover exhaustively the whole of reality, but to construct systems and concepts which will perhaps — and it is a big perhaps — allow man to act on the world."

"This was Fiesta. Overhead were strings of colored lights. In the center of the square was a small green park, trees and benches and a draped in red-and-orange . A low cement wall ran around the park with entrances at each corner. Entrances hung with grotesque standards. In the street that circled the park, were thatched booths, smelling of food, the acrid smell of ; stacked with cases of , decorated with s, cheap canes topped with celluloid dolls wiggling feathers, and cheap sticks with flimsy yellow birds floating from them, balloons on brittle wooden sticks.This was Fiesta: a run-down carnival."

"“We didn’t know it was only the first then. It was a girl down on . She was a nice enough kid for the life she lived, I guess. Danced in a bump-and-grind house down there. We found her in an alley. Strangled.: He picked up his glass, emptied it. “No clues. Nothing. …”"

"Reading Dorothy B. Hughes’s novel ' for the first time is like finding the long-lost final piece to an enormous . Within its s, its -scented shadows, you feel as though you’ve discovered a delicious and dark secret, a tantalizing page-turner with sneakily subversive undercurrents. While only intermittently in print for much of the last half century, its influence on crime fiction is unsung yet inescapable. From Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson to Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Harris, nearly every “” tale of the last seventy years bears its imprint—both in terms of its sleek, relentless style and its claustrophobic “mind of the criminal” perspective. But its larger influence derives from Hughes’s uncanny grasp of the connection between violence and misogyny and an embattled masculinity. And its importance extends beyond form or genre and into cultural mythos: the birth of ."

"German orientalists, A.W. Schlegel claimed in 1819, were not suited to be missionaries or colonizers: “... on the other hand, they are all the more ideally suited to appreciate the world-historical, philological and philosophical insights the study of Indian monuments can offer. For the kinds of research that sharpen the eye for these sorts of perspectives on the unknown, prehistorical world are already deeply rooted in Germany, and foreign scholars cannot even imagine many of the concepts which the Germans already thoroughly comprehend.’"

"It is a spirit. It comes we know not whence. It will not speak at our bidding, nor answer in our language. It is not our servant; it is our master."

"I have dwelt thus at length on Hamlet's melancholy because, from the psychological point of view, it is the centre of the tragedy, and to omit it from consideration or to underrate its intensity is to make Shakespeare's story unintelligible. But the psychological point of view is not equivalent to the tragic; and, having once given its due weight to the fact of Hamlet's melancholy, we may freely admit, or rather may be anxious to insist, that this pathological condition would excite but little, if any, tragic interest if it were not the condition of a nature distinguished by that speculative genius on which the Schlegel–Coleridge type of theory lays stress. Such theories misinterpret the connection between that genius and Hamlet's failure, but still it is this connection which gives to his story its peculiar fascination and makes it appear (if the phrase may be allowed) as the symbol of a tragic mystery inherent in human nature. Wherever this mystery touches us, wherever we are forced to feel the wonder and awe of man's godlike 'apprehension' and his 'thoughts that wander through eternity,' and at the same time are forced to see him powerless in his petty sphere of action, and powerless (it would appear) from the very divinity of his thought, we remember Hamlet. And this is the reason why, in the great ideal movement which began towards the close of the eighteenth century, this tragedy acquired a position unique among Shakespeare's dramas, and shared only by Goethe's Faust. It was not that Hamlet is Shakespeare's greatest tragedy or most perfect work of art; it was that Hamlet most brings home to us at once the sense of the soul's infinity, and the sense of the doom which not only circumscribes that infinity but appears to be its offspring."

"I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s Ghost Sat for a civil service post. The English paper for that year Had several questions on King Lear, Which Shakespeare answered very badly Because he hadn’t read his Bradley."

"There can be no poetry without spirit."