#criticism

Hardy classified A Pair of Blue Eyes among ‘Romances and Fantasies’. A favourite of Tennyson, its melancholy treatment of youth, love and death is expressive of late nineteenth-century susceptibilities. Not unnaturally in an early novel, Hardy draws freely on his own life. ↗

— Geoffrey Harvey

#death

Bloomsbury lost Fry, in 1934, and Lytton Strachey before him, in January 1932, to early deaths. The loss of Strachey was compounded by Carrington’s suicide just two months after, in March. Another old friend, Ka Cox, died of a heart attack in 1938. But the death, in 1937, of Woolf ’s nephew Julian, in the Spanish Civil War, was perhaps the bitterest blow. Vanessa found her sister her only comfort: ‘I couldn’t get on at all if it weren’t for you’ (VWB2 203). Julian, a radical thinker and aspiring writer, campaigned all his life against war, but he had to be dissuaded by his family from joining the International Brigade to fight Franco. Instead he worked as an ambulance driver, a role that did not prevent his death from shrapnel wounds. Woolf ’s Three Guineas, she wrote to his mother, was written ‘as an argument with him ↗

— Jane Goldman

#death

Mankind is immortal in the comic perspective not by virtue of man's subjugation of nature but by virtue of man's subjection to it. The "fall" in tragedy ends in death; the fall in comedy ends in bed, where, by natures's arithmetic, one and one make a brand new one. ↗

— Rose A. Zimbardo

#literary-criticism #death

In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since. ↗

— Voltaire

#religion #religion

I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for... Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom. ↗

— Edward W. Said

#edward-said #freedom #politics #freedom

The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness). ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#childlessness #fable #fantasy-literature #literary-criticism #literature

But, when I had this feeling and started painting sacred art, as I had this feeling to do, then it come to me: my problem is I'll get a lot of criticism and another problem is my work's not good enough to sell. ↗

— Howard Finster

#art #come #criticism #enough #feeling

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone. ↗

— Mark Twain

#criticism #jerk #reading #writing #want

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#background #become #criticism #forgotten #gestures

Know that the amount of criticism you receive may correlate somewhat to the amount of publicity you receive. ↗

— Donald Rumsfeld

#correlate #criticism #know #may #publicity