Literary Critics

"“Sometimes while you wait for what you think is better … what is good enough slips away.”"

"It isn't as if there were a lot of women, let alone African American women vice presidents," Tademy said. "There was a lot of bewilderment. And then 18 months later, when I said I was going to write a book, that's when people's eyes rolled back in their heads."

"“There is nothing more satisfying than having plans.”"

"“Making a better way for the children. In the end, making a better life for our children what we all want.”"

"“There is a special way of seeing come with age and distance, a kind of knowing how things happen even without knowing why. Seeing what show up one or two generations removed, from a father to a son or grandson, like repeating threads weaving through the same bolt of cloth. Repeating scraps at the foot and the head of a quilt.”"

"“We been writ out of the history of this town. They got a metal marker down to the courthouse tell a crazy twisting of what really happen Easter Sunday sixty years ago. The ones with the upper hand make the story fit how they want, and tell it so loud people tricked into thinking it real but writing down don’t make it so. The littlest colored child in Colfax, Louisiana, know better than to speak the truth of that time out loud, but real stories somehow carry forward, generation to generation.”"

"I literally woke up one morning and said 'I am going to write a book.' I didn't write it from chapter one. I just tried to get to know who these women [my ancestors] were. I wrote in their voices for a couple of months. I would write it as a diary, and then I would put two of them in the room together and see how they interacted with one another. And then I put three in a room together until I began to really feel that I had a handle on who they were and how they would react. And what happened was a novel."

"My childhood had a great influence in making me very determined to be independent and listen to my own voice. And that really put me in very good stead when I started my corporate career. I had built up my career, and I had climbed the corporate ladder. After a couple of decades, I had worked myself up to being a Vice President and General Manager of a Fortune 500 Company in Silicon Valley."

"Man cannot be conceived outside of the state."

"The state is [...] an alliance of past generations with the following ones, and vice versa. It is an alliance not only of contemporaries, but also of 'spatial contemporaries'; [...] The state is not merely the union of many 'living side by side', but also of many 'succeeding one another' families."

"I too have often dreamed of a union of that greater nation to which we belong, as a branch belongs to the trunk, expecting revolutions, heroes, and various changes in the sentiments of nations, which should come and favor the dream. The great federalism of European peoples, which will one day come, as surely as we live, will also bear German colors; for everything great, profound, and eternal in all European institutions is German – that is the certainty that has remained to me among all those hopes. Who can still separate the German element out of Europe?"

"[...] the soul feels, in contemplation of the landscape, a gentle being-carried, a movement as if by an invisible spirit, through which lingering on the charming details first gains its appeal."

"Man is endowed with a thousandfold desires and infinite longings, and thus has been sent into a world that would be rich enough to grant even more than he can demand. Every glow of the heart finds its shadow, every thirst its wave, every longing its distance, and countless hidden, well-protected refuges are prepared for the soul that strives for safety and peace."

"A poem is a whole, complete 'made' world: a fiction is a half, incomplete, poorly made piece of world."

"An artist who forgets the world over his work will never speak to the world through the work, may perhaps tear the work dead from himself, but will never be able to close it into its own free and necessary life."

"Müller was a man of great and versatile talents, an excellent orator, and a suggestive writer."

"The reconciliation of science and art and of their noblest ideas with serious political life was the purpose of my larger works."

"When the world of the senses and the world of the spirit appear absolutely separated, then sin is at its peak: it has systematized and completed itself."

"Inerrancy about one's own powers is not a mark of the Victorian poets, nor even is a simple prudence about not over-reaching or over-archaizing. The Victorian poetaster over 'weens'."

"Great Britain was Victorian for two-thirds of a century. Things changed and counterchanged; even the Queen often proved a surprise, though it may be thought that she was a surprise like a Browning character, by being even more herself than one would ever have anticipated."

"[M]ost of us are not good at appreciating the poetry of those appreciably younger than we are."

"[T]o travesty or to calumniate the Victorians is still such a cheap holiday."

"Taste, discretion, and decision have, one likes to think, been exercised so as to manifest the variety of an age's poems, the felicitous heterogeneity, the diverting diversity, and the buoyant resistance which a world of poems will always put up even to the best literary historian's summary justice."

"Any anthologist of the unparagoned achievement that is English poetry must enjoy the pleasure, privilege, and responsibility of being for a while the master of its ceremonies. Or of being, at any rate, in the rueful Americanism, kinda humble and kinda proud."

"[I]t is characteristic of true simplicity that there may radiate from its utmost directness a good many glinting things."

"[The test of value in a work of art is] whether or not it continues to repay attention."

"English poetry – having a life of its own – is forever being supplemented, complemented, culled, and found afresh. The anthologist had better not repine at the thought of his or her future departure."

"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."

"The most valuable thing in my college Latin courses was that they were under a Virginian from the , whose belief in this was inherited and profound and therefore contagious."

"Stark Young was a man of protean interests in the arts. Because of this breadth of interest, it is arguable whether his main achievement was in fiction or in criticism, since he excelled in both, but after immersing myself in Young's critical writings in the theater, I have come to the conclusion that Young was the finest American critic on the art of the theatre of the first half of this century ..."

"The history of any art is a history of man's states of mind and spirit, not of the objective world around him. To be ignorant of that is to be ignorant of the theater as an art, and leads to a mere muddle of resemblances and recognitions, a confusion between life and the theatre, contradictions about naturalness and artifice, and blindness to such ideas as require a new method or form to express them."

"Unhurt people are not much good in the world."

"As Wells insists, many of Verne's inventions have materialized since his time. travel is a commonplace, and the circumnavigation of the moon is more than a possibility. Well's imaginings, however, remain as unattainable now as when he wrote: no one has yet contrived to travel through time, or ; we are still unable to , nor can we ."

"The s whom we admire to-day do not appear to love their s, and the s who appraise their books show no signs of doing so either. For a writer or critic to show delight in a character would would seem to-day rather naïve, an old-fashioned response left over from the days of Dickens and Surtees. Characters, it seems, are no longer objects of affection."

"Arnold Rattenbury was too young to be very active in the , but in the early he was friendly with several older Communist writers who had been. ... Although I make limiting judgements on Auden in the following pages, his centrality in the seems to me unmistakable. Unlike other hostile critics of 'orthodoxy', Mr Rattenbury does give a hostage to fortune by proposing an alternative."

"The poet and critic Bernard Bergonzi, who has died aged 87, was long associated with the teaching of 20th-century English literature at . His books shed new light on the English writing of the first world war and the 1930s, and on developments in criticism since the 60s, which he largely disliked. Monographs on HG Wells, TS Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Arnold and Graham Greene showed Bergonzi at his sensible and lucid best."

"Proust, who did not greatly admire Flaubert, except perhaps in his narrow sense as a stylist – or perhaps only did not care very much for his work – nevertheless owed him a great deal, without realizing how much. From Flaubert he obtained the art of expressing his characters indirectly, through a monologue interieur. This method of characterization is one of Flaubert's greatest contributions to the art of fiction and, as we have seen in Madame Bovary, it is very different from the direct method of characterization practised by Balzac and Stendhal."

"What to do? I have to get drunk on a bottle of ambrosia, What's left of my youthful banquets. I leave with a rose in my hand, with the moon under my armpit, And I leave the rest for new poets."

"I know now: it's as bright as the sun in the sky, And the heart must die under heavy mourning, Because I will never take you to myself for eternity. You will never be me and I will never be you."

"I feel very bad today, I feel very sad, My thoughts are withered, sick, like flowers on a grave, Outside the windows, the sky hangs like a gray canvas. I can't love you or think about you today."

"You ask what is the most important thing in my life, I'll tell you: death and love - both."

"And in spring - let me see spring, not Poland."

"A night with you - this is one thing that works like hashish, Only one thing you can believe in unconsciously. And I don't know if there is love apart from your body And I know you don't love me, that you will forget about me."

"As an element in the reaction against mass values the intellectuals brought into being the theory of the avant-garde, according to which the mass is, in art and literature, always wrong. What is truly meritorious in art is seen as the prerogative of a minority, the intellectuals, and the significance of this minority is reckoned to be directly proportionate to its ability to outrage and puzzle the mass. Though it usually purports to be progressive, the avant-garde is consequently always reactionary. That is, it seeks to take literacy and culture away from the masses, and so to counteract the progressive intentions of democratic educational reform."

"Carey argued that the intelligentsia was driven to create literary modernism by a profound loathing of ordinary common readers. The intellectuals feared the masses not because they were illiterate but because, by the early twentieth century, they were becoming more literate, thanks to public education, adult education, scholarships, and cheap editions of the great books. If more and more working people were reading the classics, if they were closing the cultural gap between themselves and the middle classes, how could intellectuals preserve their elite status as arbiters of taste and custodians of rare knowledge? They had to create a new body of modernist literature which was deliberately made so difficult and obscure that the average reader could not understand it."

"Carey is extremely well read, and uses his impressive knowledge to point out some of the sillinesses of writers, such as in their attacks on "tinned food" and cremation as possible causes for the decline of British civilization. He is a healthy questioner of received opinions. It forces one to rethink one's preconceptions."

"Huge and alert, irascible yet strong, We make our fitful way 'mid right and wrong. One time we pour out millions to be free, Then rashly sweep an empire from the sea! One time we strike the shackles from the slaves, And then, quiescent, we are ruled by knaves. Often we rudely break restraining bars, And confidently reach out toward the stars."

"This is the Land we love, our heritage, Strange mixture of the gross and fine, yet sage And full of promise,—destined to be great. Drink to Our Native Land! God Bless the State!"

"Nature never says anything to a child. To read its message one must look at it with eyes already old."

"I weep those dead lips, white and dry, On which no kisses lie, Those eyes deserted of desire, And love’s soft fire. I weep the folded feet and hands, Held fast in linen bands; Still heart, cold breasts—for them my dole: God hath the soul."