Buried Quote by Arthur Symons

Many critics are like woodpeckers, who, instead of enjoying the fruit and shadow of a tree, hop incessantly around the trunk, pecking holes in…

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Critics are a kind of freebooters in the republic of letters--who, like deer, goats and divers other graminivorous animals, gain subsistence by gorging upon…

— Washington Irving

I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that…

— Djuna Barnes

“It has also convinced me that carefully writing everything down is the only real defense we have against forgetting something important that once was…

— Hope Jahren

Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism.

— Josef Skvorecky

A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.

— Edward Abbey

“But, somehow or other, it is always the young and inexperienced, who are most apt to be positive and self-willed in their opinions; and…

— Margaret Gatty

“If a tree’s strength is judged while it is still a seed, it is mistaken as weak.”

— Idowu Koyenikan

Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine That lights the pathway but one step ahead Across a void of mystery and dread.

— George Santayana

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant,…

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“The twinkle that softens the review; the martyr's super-logic and the child's intuition; the fact that a fragment of moss can pull back into…

— Beatrice Warde

Voices in the forest tell of dark and twisted enchantments - as dark and twisted as the roots and grasping branches of the trees…

— Brian Froud