10 quotes
Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity do not easily resume life.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs — but a tribute nevertheless.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
The new pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
What lies beyond man's word is eloquent of God. That is the joyously defeated recognition expressed in the poems of St. John of the Cross and of the mystic tradition.
When the word of the poet ceases, a great light begins.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
If future society assumes the contours foretold by Marxism, if the jungle of our cities turns to the polis of man and the dreams of anger are made real, the representative art will be high comedy. Art will be the laughter of intelligence, as it is in Plato, in Mozart, in Stendhal.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch's shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoevsky if he could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue the poise of Lawrence if he could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow?
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)