Literary Critics

"Perhaps indeed Jehovah is not dead, But mere retir’d, withdrawn or otherwise Contracted hath, as Zohar subtle saith, His Essence Infinite; and, Epicurean, waits The outcome vast with vast indifference."

"They had all been things, not people, to each other, which after all is the only sensible and fruitful attitude in a thing-dominated world. (Except, of course, for Father Domenico, whose desire to prevent anybody from accomplishing anything, chiefly by wringing his hands, had to be written off as the typical, incomprehensible attitude of the mystic—a howling anachronism in the modern world, and predictably ineffectual.) And in point of fact none of them—not even Father Domenico—could fairly be said to have failed. Instead, they had all been betrayed. Their plans and operations had all depended implicitly upon the existence of God—even Jack, who had entered Positano as an atheist, had been reluctantly forced to grant that—and in the final pinch, He had turned out to have been not around any more after all. If this shambles was anyone’s fault, it was His."

"“Though the wicked may hide, the claws of crabs are dangerous people in bridges,” Father Selahny intoned abruptly. As was the case with all his utterances, the group would doubtless find out what this one meant only after sorting out its mixed mythologies and folklores, and long after it was too late to do anything about it."

"The first thing a psychologist learns is to keep her mouth shut around laymen."

"He wore the expression of a man who has heard all this before, and is not enjoying it any better the second time."

"“Look at it this way for a moment, Dr. Ware. Very roughly, there are only two general kinds of men who go into the munitions business—those without consciences, who see the business as an avenue to a great fortune, eventually to be used for something else, like Jack here—and of course there’s a subclass of those, people who do have consciences but can’t resist the money anyhow, or the knowledge, rather like Dr. Hess.” Both men stirred, but apparently both decided not to dispute their portraits. “The second kind is made up of people like me—people who actually take pleasure in the controlled production of chaos and destruction. Not sadists primarily, except in the sense that every dedicated artist is something of a sadist, willing to countenance a little or a lot of suffering—not only his own, but other people’s—for the sake of the end product.” “A familiar type, to be sure,” Ware said with a lopsided grin. “I think it was the saintly Robert Frost who said that a painting by Whistler was worth any number of old ladies.” “Engineers are like this too,” Baines said."

"A common thief with a gun in his hand isn’t half as dangerous as an engineer with a stick of dynamite."

"He had been greatly talented once, but the loss of gifted experimenters to administrative posts was the curse of all research organizations."

"You’ll remember I told you I was interested in the history of science. That involves trying to understand why there wasn’t any science for so long, and why it went into eclipse almost every time it was rediscovered. I think I know why now. I think the human mind goes through a sort of cycle of fear. It can only take so much accumulated knowledge, and then it panics, and starts inventing reasons to throw everything over and go back to a Dark Age…every time with a new, invented mystical reason."

"But now the shots began—not many, but one shot is a fusillade if there have been no shots before."

"One death is as good as another, if death is what you are courting."

"Munitions and magic are circles that don’t intersect very effectively."

"“Impossible!” Father Domenico cried, though choking with the dust of the exploded crucifix. “It is written that in that war you will at last nature conquered and chained!”"

"Yet the closer he came to it, the more alert he felt; it was as though he were paying more and more attention to fewer and fewer things, so that at the heart of the mystery he would paradoxically be totally intent upon nothing at all."

"“Your concept is a tremendous network of inconsistencies.” “In what way?” the countess said, not very much interested. “It seems to be based on reverence for the young, and an extremely patient and protective attitude toward their physical and mental welfare. Yet you make them live in these huge caves, utterly out of contact with the natural world, and you teach them to be afraid of death—which of course makes them a little insane, because there is nothing anybody can do about death. It is like teaching them to be afraid of the second law of thermodynamics, just because living matter sets that law aside for a very brief period."

"Telepathy and intelligence appear to be incompatible from the evolutionary point of view—if you’ve got one, you don’t seem to need the other, and they may even be evolutionary enemies."

"In retrospect, each of the steps toward this abyss seemed irrevocable, and yet they had all been so small!"

"“We hear you, Father,” he said surprisingly. “Yet we sense that though what you say is the truth, it is not the whole truth.”"

"Never assume that any fact is useless until it is so proven."

"The express pulled into the Stazione Termini in Rome five minutes ahead of schedule with a feminine shriek. Ruiz found a porter with no difficulty, tipped him the standard 100 lire for his two pieces of luggage, and gave directions. The priest’s Italian was adequate, but hardly standard; it made the facchino grin with delight every time Ruiz opened his mouth. He had learned it by reading, partly in Dante, mostly in opera libretti, and consequently what he lacked in accent he made up for in flowery phrases; he was unable to ask the way to the nearest fruit stall without sounding as though he would throw himself into the Tiber unless he got an answer."

"Martel still did not want to believe in it, but brute experience of it forced him to, whatever his preferences."

"The early anatomists, who laid the foundations of scientific medicine, were primarily artists; the early psychotherapists, like Freud, were primarily poets. Neither group ever cured anything, but each opened up a previously forbidden area of investigation. Both were retired to the sidelines when really hardcore knowledge began to be available."

"In his opinion, neither justice nor mercy were very closely related to love, let alone being identical with it—otherwise, why have three words instead of one? A metaphor is not a tautology."

"I suppose you burned the library—barbarians always do."

"It is written: That given any one of a thousand million possible paths, life will take them all; That worlds which will support life will give birth to it; That worlds which cannot support intelligent life will be colonized; And that where both can take place, both will take place. It is written that this is what the vast, unknowing interstellar stage is for: To be given consciousness and purpose while its gift of existence lasts. It is written: That this is a random process; That in the end all will be darkness and silence again; But that while it lasts, life spreads through it, to make it aware of its own vastness and beauty, which otherwise it can never have known. This is a gift; but the Giver is unknown. That too is written."

"Now that I'm a free agent I mean to make my own choices, and explain them to nobody if that’s what pleases me."

"There was one wing of the conservatives, however, which had gone the 12-tone procedure one better. These men composed what was called “stochastic music,” put together by choosing each individual note by consultation with tables of random numbers. Their bible, their basic text, was a volume called Operational Aesthetics, which in turn derived from a discipline called information theory, and not one word of it seemed to touch upon any of the techniques and customs of composition known to Strauss. The ideal of this group was to produce music which would be “universal”—that is, wholly devoid of any trace of the composer’s individuality, wholly a musical expression of the universal Laws of Chance. The Laws of Chance seemed to have a style of their own, all right, but to Strauss it seemed the style of an idiot child being taught to hammer a flat piano to keep him from getting into trouble."

"It isn’t every composer who can premier his own last opera posthumously."

"The tribesmen understand this very well, although they would not describe it in the same terms I have. It is simply a working part of their lives. Do you think they would continue to consult me if they found that the advice that I gave them did not work? They are uncivilized, but they are not insane."

"High intelligence did not imply superior ability to come to terms with one’s social environment; indeed, there seemed to be some sort of rough correlation between high intelligence and the accumulation of aberrations."

"Of course a sense of guilt has a threshold; at a certain level of intensity it begins to confirm the habit-pattern rather than inhibit it—"

"You may as well go, Maurice. You can’t undo what you’ve done in any case, nor can I expect to talk to you out of whatever it is you’re planning. But I will tell you this: Your sanity is dubious."

"All but a small percentage of Americans live out of their lives without ever coming closer to murder than the daily tabloid can bring them, though magazine fiction and video confer spurious intimacy with the subject."

"Sam was too good a scientist to let that hope creep into his hypothesizing."

"The subject was complex enough to nurture family splits as rancorous and as final as the theological hairsplitting which had been the bane of other ages."

"He was getting to be a little old for combat or for princesses, but what was worse, he had become a lot more cynical without having become even slightly the wiser."

"Harold Bloom’s theory is that all poets are in competition with their forebears, and that in paying homage to them they really distort them. I think the theory itself is flawed; sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes homage is simply homage."

"Bloom is very interested in the powerful "characters" which are thrown up in the process. He celebrates Goethe's "unique and overwhelming personality", Montaigne's "highly original personality" and various critics' "vehement and colorful personalities". In this he takes his cue from Johnson, who reinvested the art of biographical criticism. For Bloom lacks Johnson's restraint; instead he is imbued with a strain of neo-romantic fervour which allows him to speak continually of the "sublime" and to invoke the principles of "strangeness" and "originality" as the canonical qualities of great writing. He is also preoccupied by the actual characters within various fictions and imagines, for example, Falstaff and the Wife of Bath in some titanic confrontation. He is not very far here from Hazlitt or Lamb, but he is a Romantic essayist who has also been touched by Pater's aestheticism. It is hard, however, to think of a better tradition for any literary critic."

"as Harold Bloom said, “You want novelty? Read the classics.”"

"Like a literary Lear, Harold Bloom stands amid the storm, lamenting and fulminating as he fights to protect the kingdom of letters against what he calls the "rabblement of lemmings", the multicultural ideologues and political doctrinaires who assail it from all sides... His primary target is what he calls "The School of Resentment", the "rabblement" of "feminists, Afro-centrists, Marxists, Foucault-inspired New Historicists or Deconstructors" who would bend literature to ideology or pull it apart in the name of social justice. But he has equal scorn for right-leaning critics who defend the Western canon on the basis of its moral authority."

"Lucretius and his tradition taught Shelley that freedom came from understanding causation."

"Shelley, who in Prometheus Unbound had observed that the wise lack love and those who have love lack wisdom, went to his end in The Triumph of Life asking why good and the means of good were irreconcilable."

"I must say these Oxfordians are very virulent and, forgive me for saying it, very crazy people indeed."

"Hamlet, Kiekegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates."

"I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike — and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two — are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats."

"The outward limit of human achievement."

"He has tried natural religion, and has found this frail bark unfit to carry humanity. Seeing it sinking under him, he has hastened to pass into another vessel; that is to say, that theism, like atheism, has disappointed him. Always despair, you say. But let us have done with this singular reproach. In fact, what is it to you whether I have begun with despair or not? Am I obliged to render you an account of the matter? I was only responsible to you, or rather to myself, to examine. Have I done so? That is the question. And to return to Pascal; has Pascal examined? Has Pascal been convinced? Has Pascal become a Christian by conviction? Or has Pascal thrown himself into the faith as into a dark abyss? Has his conversion been nought but a suicide of his reason? I appeal on this point to all who have read the Thoughts, to all who are acquainted with the life of Pascal. p. 191"

"Man feels in himself passions which ought to obey, and a reason which ought to command. But it is in vain: the war is endless; victory on either side is impossible. Neither can reason subdue the passions, nor can the passions put reason to silence. p. 17"

"It is then settled: he will investigate whether God, the fountain of all truth, the key of all mysteries, be not anywhere revealed. To seek Him with the reason alone, holds out no hope of success; the experience which he has had respecting the knowledge of man, has rendered him distrustfull as to the means of knowing God. p. 27-28"

"Meditation leads from ignorance to ignorance, from ignorance which does not know itself to ignorance which does know itself. This is the point that philosophers attain to. Also, true philosophy is to laugh at philosophy; and if Aristotle and Plato deserve the name of philosophers, it is rather by the practical wisdom of their life than by their metaphysical speculations. Reason alone, then, is an imperfect or a false instrument; and if truth is to enter into us, it is by another door than that of reasoning. p. 12"