16 Quotes Tagged: literary

"James's critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. [...] In England, ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the public, the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought. [...] James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation."

(Little Review, 1918)

Most critics, fond of subservient art
still make the whole depend upon a part.
They talk of principles, but notions prize
And all to one loved folly sacrifice.

He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that's an earthquake. And then you get a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished.

They never opened the door which leads to the soul.

The sky had never seemed so sky; the world had never seemed so world.

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.

The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that.

I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

She had once been the belle of her circle of small tradesmen and salesmen, but now her little pig eyes with their swollen lids could scarcely open.

I always say, 'Books beat boredom,' said Amanda wisely.

The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.

Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Second, they think somebody's going to publish it. Third, they think somebody's going to read it. Fourth, they think somebody's going to like it. How optimistic is that?

A garden is never finished. In that sense it is like the human world and all human undertakings.

...it occurred to me that I could use the energy I had been putting into endurance to change my life. Yet the concept of brunt, of accepting and enduring, still seems to me to have a kind of nobility. It is, perhaps, less intelligent, but there is a stubborn selfhood about it that is dear to me. It can be, quite literally, the only way to survive.

High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk.