3,834 Quotes About Fiction
- Author Melanie Dickerson
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O God, why did you make me a woman? So that men could try to take advantage of me? I am no good to my brothers when they need me the most. Am I only useful for making them sweaters?
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- Author Melanie Dickerson
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I don't understand why so many unjust things happen. I know I should accept it as part of life in a fallen world.
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- Author Melanie Dickerson
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Showing your emotions does not make you weak. Just as not showing emotions does not make you strong.
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- Author John Gardner
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True criticism praises true art for what it does-praises as plainly and comprehensively as possible-and denounces false art for its failure to do art's proper work. No easy task, the task of the critic, since the trolls are masters of disguise.
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- Author John Gardner
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The critic's proper business is explanation and evaluation, which means he must make use of his analytic powers to translate the concrete to the abstract.
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- Author John Gardner
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Art combines fancy and judgement.
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- Author John Gardner
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True art imitates nature's total process: endless blind experiment (fish that climb tress, hands with nine fingers, shifts in and out of tonality) and then ruthless selectivity-the artist's sober judgements, like a lion's, of what can be killed, what is better left alone, such as (for the lion) rhinos and certain nasty snakes. Art, in sworn opposition to chaos, discovers by its process what it can say. That is art's morality.
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- Author John Gardner
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True art is too complex to reflect the party line.
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- Author John Gardner
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Only in lament does the artist cry out, 'Birds build but not I build," and the lament points to how things out to be: art builds; it never stands pat; it destroys only evil. If art destroys good, mistaking it for evil, then that art is false, an error; it requires denunciation. This, I have claimed, is what true art is about-preservation of the world of gods and men.
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