Sample Critical Lens Quotes

~"In literature, evil often triumphs, but never conquers."

~"Good people... are good because they've come to wisdom through failure."
~"All literature is protest. You can't name a single literary work that isn't protest."
~"The bravest of individuals is the one who obeys his or her conscience."
~"Knowing about the life and times of an author is irrelevant to appreciating the full
meaning of a literary work."
~"A work of literature must provide more than factual accuracy or vivid physical
reality... it must tell us more than we already know."
~"Good literature appeals to our intelligence and imagination, not merely our curiosity."
~"A writer should aim to reach all levels of society and as many levels of thought as
possible, avoiding democratic prejudice as much as intellectual snobbery."
~"If the literature we are reading does not wake us, then why do we read it? A literary
work must be an ice-axe to break the frozen sea inside us."
~"I am interested in making a good case for distortion because I am coming to believe
that is the only way to make people see."
~"A work of literature is limited by the dominant attitudes and ideas of the period in
which it is written."
~"If literature is nebulous or inexact, this inexactness is the price literature pays for
representing whole human beings and for embodying whole human feelings."
~"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." ~George Orwell
~Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesnt go away. ~Philip K. Dick
~Humankind cannot stand very much reality. TS Eliot
~Reality is the only word in the English language that should always be used in quotes.
~Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality. Jules de Gaultier
~Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
~Soren Kierkegaard
~The purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. ~
Bernard Malamud

~"This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper." ~TS Eliot
~History repeats itself; that's one of the things that's wrong with history.
~Clarence Darrow
~This is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. But, it is, perhaps the
end of the beginning.~ Winston Churchill
~When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of
human civilization. ~Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
~"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization." ~ Ralph
Waldo Emerson
~"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature
dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill." Barbara Tuchman
~The world is beautiful, but has a disease called man." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
~The ultimate security is your understanding of reality. ~H. Stanly Judd
~The truly educated man is that rare individual who can separate reality from illusion.
~The real hero is always a hero by mistake ~Umberto Eco
~it is the human lot to try and fail... ~David Mamet
~Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right using of strength. ~Henry Ward
Beecher
~For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with
forces larger than yourself. ~Norman Mailer
~To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else.
~Bernadette Devlin
~The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and
convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. ~Martin
Luther King, Jr.
All that is literature seeks to communicate power... ~Thomas De Quincey ~