John Leonard (critic)

“There are too many ironies in the fire!”

“My fathering had always taken the form of a friendly cloud that floated across the lives of the children, and paused occasionally to cast a shadow. That they would turn out to have their own weather, and that I would profit by the climate, was an immense satisfaction.”

“Everybody is forever saying that the essay is dead. This is always said in essays.”

“Run from the Furies, and they find you, as if fear were a homing device, as if literature itself, on contemplating the abyss, were an invitation to jump into it, while Wagner whistles.”

“Every intelligent child is an amateur anthropologist. The first thing such a child notices is that adults don't make sense.”

“Crossing color, class, gender, and generational lines, the communities of addiction and recovery are as democratic as America gets. Twelve-step meetings are in fact downright radical: nonprofit and nonhierarchical, with a fierce etiquette of listening to and caring about everyone who wanders into the rooms.”

“Addiction may be something to which some of us are predisposed, like diabetes, rather than a voluntary behavior — but it’s also reversible. A "disease model" of alcoholism and other addictions in no way diminishes our personal accountability once we know the facts. It simply suggests how hard recovery will be, and how much help we need.”

“It makes me itchy, this wry fatalism, but it doesn't make me itch nearly as much as the heroes of so many other modern novels for whom stalking the savage libido is more fun than kinship or community; who will leave town either to find their callow selves, as if they'd lost anything important, or, more transgressively, to kill a bear, a bull, a whale, a unicorn, a hippogriff, a signifier or, preferably, their fathers.”

“Maybe the unconscious is overrated... What if your unconscious is full of false consciousness or bad faith? What if it's more like a trash compactor than a dreamcatcher? What if it's a diseased hump, a vampire bat, an alien abductor? Somewhere in Pieces and Pontifications, somebody asked him: "Why can't the unconscious be as error-prone as the conscious?" It was a Freudian question he never answered.”

“The words, the style always reflects a habit of mind. And the habit of mind comes in from a different angle. The habit of mind uses the colloquial here and uses the joke there. And then creates some discordant music and then something strange and wonderful happens. And you see things differently. You see a different light is shed on it.”

“The life, no matter how traumatic, never explains the work, if the work is any good. W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Doris Lessing, and Saul Bellow variously believed in faeries, funny money, flying saucers, and orgone energy accumulation, but so have millions of other people who never got around to writing even a mediocre poem or novel.”

“Prisons are a growth industry in a country that has stopped building schools because we would rather not pay our property taxes. And we seem remarkably comfortable with a criminal-justice system that locks up and "disappears" people we fear or hold in contempt — with prisons as closets to hide our unmentionables and as factories for processing spare human parts until there is nothing left but waste.”

“You marry to be worthy of a gift, and want to say so out loud, but without shouting. One doesn't shout a prayer. Marriage is one of the few ceremonies left to us about which it is impossible — or at least self-demeaning — to be cynical.”

“Granted, religion is wishful thinking, but there is no other kind of thinking.”

“One advantage of remorse is that it sets the stage for consolation.”

“We are getting to be of an age when it is difficult to grow new friends; we haven't the energy, the time to cultivate; each one gone is a permanent impoverishment.”

“In God's body shop, each of us was customized. But science came along to substitute statistical inference for free will. We are now a tribe of likelihoods.”

“Suppose, deep down, you suspect that you are dull, and your public works are a form of vengeance. You talk a good poem, and think by numbers. Once upon a time, you were interesting; then Mother died and you had to give it up.”

“Every fall I imagine once again that something wonderful will happen at a party. This is like imagining that the telephone book will prove to be a wonderful novel.”

“When the state murders, it assumes an authority I refuse to concede: the authority of perfect knowledge in final things.”

“A bohemian imitates the manners of the class below him.”

“In our brave new world, blushing is a form of nostalgia.”

“You can't invent yourself as you maunder on. Your fabrications aren't going to impress the blood test, the urinalysis or the chest X-ray. Science is not amused.”

“To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms.”

“Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?”

“Somewhere in the Bill of Rights is a Pig Amendment; our freedom to stuff ourselves cannot be abridged. Having so stuffed, we demand a technological solution to the fat problem. Give me cyclamates, or give me death! This is not only immoral; it is also boring.”

“Monotheism was a terrible idea, leading directly to Lenin.”