131 quotes
Christina Stead has a Chinese say, “Our old age is perhaps life’s decision about us” — or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
Gertrude knew better than this, of course, but we all know better than we know better, or act as if we did.
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
Be, as you have been, my happiness;
Let me sleep beside you, each night, like a spoon.
The Lost World (1965)
Many poets...write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
...in this world, often, there is nothing to praise but no one to blame...
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)
Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)
If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Malraux writes in a language in which there is no way to say "perhaps" or "I don't know," so that after a while we grow accustomed to saying it for him.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
The best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst; and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything — I am being sympathetic, not satiric — for the very best reasons.
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson.
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
One thinks with awe and longing of this real and extraordinary popularity of hers [Edna St. Vincent Millay’s]: if there were some poet — Frost, Stevens, Eliot — whom people still read in canoes!
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
...it is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
The nurse is the night
To wake to, to die in: and the day I live,
The world and its life are her dreams.
Blood for a Stranger (1942)
...there is in this world no line so bad that someone won’t someday copy it.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
If Benton had had an administration building with pillars it could have carved over the pillars: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you guilty.
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
Compare the saint who, asked what he would do if he had only an hour to live, replied that he would go on with his game of chess, since it was as much worship as anything else he had ever done.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say that they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politician stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.
The Intellectual in America (1955)
Marx said that he had stood Hegel on his head; often Mr. [Horace] Gregory has simply stood Pollyana on her head.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)