Quotes
Quotes about Right
The aesthetic lecture has a purely intellectual appeal, and novel-readers, rightly, cannot bear very much intellectuality
This places what we must vaguely term slang into the right perspective - the home-made language of the ruled, not the rulers, the acted upon, the used, the used up. It is demonic poetry emerging in flashes of ironic insight.
There must always be somebody. However young or insignificant. There has to be somebody who comes from nowhere to say what others are too foolish or too frightened to say
God made his mind up, right from the beginning, that some were damned, some saved, and strictly what you did with life, saintly by choice or sinning, mattered to God not one benighted jot. You prosper? That probably means you're winning. You're losing, lost - the sudden voices shout it. You're lost, and nothing can be done about it.
For the day may come, some thousand years hence, when even the works of Ben Jonson will be read little, but the bright eyes of Ben Jonson will flash out here and there in a breathtaking felicity of phrase from the green Eden of God's own book that may never die.
Music, unlike literature, can be both synchronic and diachronic: we can read or hear it horizontally, from left to right, and vertically, from top to bottom.
I believe Nabokov was right in saying that language itself is one of the characters of fiction
..the people of Tudor England, like the modern Irish, were great talkers. One imagines their speech as rapid, bubbling, both earthily exact and carelessly malapropistic. It was perhaps a McLuhanesque medium, itself its own message and it exhibited the essential function of language - to maintain social contact in the dark.... Speech, when you come to think of it, is not a very exact medium: it is full of stumblings and apologies for not finding the right word; it has to be helped out with animal grunts and the gestures which, one is convinced, represent man's primal mode of communication. Take speech as a flickering auditory candle, and the mere act of maintaining its light becomes enough. Tales, gossip, riddles, word-play pass the time in the dark, and out of these - not out of the need to recount facts or state a case - springs literature.
Stories about human adults would have been frightening, for human adults were irrational, gross, demanding.
Fiction deals with the external world, where things are coloured, and the fiction writer has to get the colours right
Perhaps the Cathars were right and the flesh and the devil were one
A character in Evelyn Waugh's Put Out More Flags said that the difference between prewar and postwar life was that, prewar, if one thing went wrong the day was ruined; postwar, if one thing went right the day would be made. America is a prewar country, psychologically unprepared for one thing to go wrong.
Where is Joseph Conrad? He is up there, hard and bright, a fixed star
When I first began to write fiction it was ... refined hobby that, as I got deeper into it, began to demand more time and application than was right for a hobby: it began to wish to be a full-time job
Compassion, pity: are they not much the same What right have I to bestow pity?
I'm anxious not to miss the train. And then, when it arrives - I'm frightened of getting on it
Dreams are important. Dreams are wishful thinking. To convince the sleeper that everything's all right
Remember that life is not a right but a gift. And now the gift is removed. Be thankful that you have savoured that gift. March into the dark with erect hands, eyes open
You have no right to assume that your present present present represents a permanent and unchangeable state
It seemed to me that good and evil were probably as indefinable as right and wrong, and that the one reality was the electricity of opposition
Indiscretion in war time can be as lethal as downright treachery
Everyone has a right to be born. Noone has a right to live
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment.
In the long run the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip.
