Category Archives: Quotes

As every second post on this site is a quote. You’ll find a deep and broad variety of quotes under this category, which overlap with several other tags and categories. Many of the quotes are larded with links for deeper reading on the subject of the quote, or connections between the subject of the quotes and other people, things, or ideas. See the Taxonomies page for more about this category.

Rotten Rejections: Jacqueline Susann and Valley of the Dolls

Posted on April 25, 2018 | Leave a comment

“She is painfully dull, inept, clumsy, undisciplined, rambling and thoroughly amateurish writer whose every sentence, paragraph and scene calls for the hand of a pro. She wastes endless pages on utter trivia, writes wide-eyed romantic scenes that would not make the back pages of True Confessions, hauls out every terrible show biz cliché in all the books, lets every good scene fall apart in endless talk and allows her book to ramble aimlessly…most of the first 200 pages are virtually worthless and dreadfully dull and practically every scene is dragged out and stomped on by her endless talk….”

Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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Archetype

Posted on April 24, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Generally, a prototype or original pattern or a paradigm or abstract idea of a class of things that represents the typical and essential elements shared by all varieties of that class. In literature, myth, folklore, and religion, the term can be applied to images, themes, symbols, ideas, characters, and situations that appeal to our unconscious racial memory. T.S. Eliot explains this as civilized man’s “pre-logical mentality.” The archetype, or primordial image, touches this “pre-logical mentality.” The psychology of Carl Jung and the comparative anthropology of J.G. Frazer have given the study of archetypal patterns greater usefulness in literary criticism.

Archetypes can be primitive and universal, and consist of general themes like birth, death, coming of age, love, guild, redemption, conflict between free will and destiny, rivalry between members of the family, fertility rites; of characters like the hero rebel, the wanderer, the devil, the buffoon; and of characters like the lion, serpent, or eagle.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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The Devil’s Dictionary: Platitude

Posted on April 23, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Platitude, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A fossil sentiment in artificial rock. A moral without the fable. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A demi-tasse of milk-and-morality. The Pope’s-nose of a featherless peacock. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. The cackle surviving the egg. A desiccated epigram.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.

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Aphorism

Posted on April 20, 2018 | Leave a comment

“A compact statement, such as a maxim or proverb, that concisely expresses a principle or common experience. The term was first used by Hippocrates. The beginning sentence of his Aphorisms is a well-known example: ‘Life is short, art is long, opportunity fleeting, experimenting dangerous, reasoning difficult.”

Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Oscar Wilde on Skepticism

Posted on April 19, 2018 | Leave a comment

“To believe is very dull. To doubt intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.”

Oscar Wilde

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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Goethe on Identifying Talent and Teaching to It

Posted on April 18, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Aptitudes are assumed, they should become accomplishments. That is the purpose of all education.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities (1809)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

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Term of Art: Shtick

Posted on April 17, 2018 | Leave a comment

“A worked-up, contrived form of talent of self-presentation to entertain or win attention; an idiosyncratic routine or particular forte; mannerism.

‘Rebuttal is appropriate. For what we have here is no argument but a shtick, as we used to say in Vaudeville, an antic, a bit, a thing.’”

Donald Kaplan, in Language in America

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

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Ptolemy’s 1,022 Stars

Posted on April 16, 2018 | Leave a comment

“The great quest of medieval science was for a perfect copy of Ptolemy’s Almagest, written in Egypt in 147 AD. It was known to have thirteen sections, with the most accurate analysis of star and planetary paths ever achieved, alongside a catalogue of 1,022 starts listed on a scale of magnitude from 1 to 6. It was a key that threatened to unlock the secrets of the heavens.”            

Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.

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Rotten Reviews: John Updike and Rabbit Run

Posted on April 13, 2018 | Leave a comment

“This grim little story is told with all the art we have learned to expect from Updike, but the nagging question remains: what does it come to? Rabbit, Janice and Ruth are all creatures of instinct, floundering in a world they cannot understand…The author fails to convince us that his puppets are interesting in themselves or that their plight has implications that transcend their narrow world.”

Milton Crane, Chicago Tribune

Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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The Devil’s Dictionary: Clergyman

Posted on April 13, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Clergyman, n. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.

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