Denby Quotes & Sayings

I really believe that anybody on the Left or the Right that tries to invoke the teachings of Jesus to say they should vote for this candidate or that candidate, I think they're stretching Scripture. — Jerry Falwell Jr.

Compressing her lips together, she gave Mark a baleful glance, eyes flashing pure malice. If he wanted his lips anywhere near hers he'd better be prepared to do battle.

'Now that's what I'm talking about,' said Mark, as the corner of his lip began to twitch in amusement. — C.P. Mandara

If you can cope the pride when winning,
then you can confront despair when lose. — Toba Beta

But what about high school? How do you establish reading pleasure in busy, screen-loving teenagers - and in particular, pleasure in reading serious work? Is it still possible to raise teenagers who can't live without reading something good? Or is that idea absurd? And could the struggle to create such hunger have any effect on the character of boys and girls? — David Denby

Art talk is punk. Let the movie do your speaking for you. — David Denby

Mi-yammi! The extraordinary city, with its Judeo-Cubano population, its mix of surgical-appliance and sex-fetishist obsessions, takes the American melting pot past the boil. It represents pretty much everything Patrick J. Buchanan hates. — David Denby

I think if you're at home and you don't want Donald Trump to be the Republican nominee, then the only candidate who can beat Donald is our campaign. And so I would encourage, even if you like another candidate, stand with us if you don't want Donald to be the nominee. — Ted Cruz

Corporate irony not only ridicules the thing it is selling but the very act of selling it. In the process it disarms critics by making anyone who goes against the flow of commerce seem clueless. — David Denby

You don't have to know about ballet to enjoy it, all you have to do is look at it. — Edwin Denby

What I like about fairy tales is that they highlight the emotions within a story. The situations aren't real, with falling stars and pirates. But what you do relate to is the emotions that the characters feel. — Charlie Cox

This really is my life's work, to go where there is suffering, — Kayla Mueller

Snark often functions as an enforcer of mediocrity and conformity. In its cozy knowingness, snark flatters you by assuming that you get the contemptuous joke. You've been admitted, or readmitted, to a club, though it may be the club of the second-rate. — David Denby

Entertaining the reader is a good function. — David Denby

Patience was not just a manner, it was the very form of seminar teaching. Columbia's core curriculum had been designed not to enshrine the authority of the lecturing professor (that was something done at Harvard) but to reach understanding through discussion, however clumsy and uncertain. Till this moment, I never knew myself. . . . Vanity, not love has been my folly! — David Denby

The Nazis, for him, are merely available movie tropes
articulate monsters with a talent for sadism. By making the Americans cruel, too, he escapes the customary division of good and evil along national lines, but he escapes any sense of moral accountability as well. In a Tarantino war, everyone commits atrocities. Like all the director's work after 'Jackie Brown,' the movie is pure sensation. It's disconnected from feeling, and an eerie blankness
it's too shallow to be called nihilism
undermines even the best scenes. — David Denby

Used to put movies down by saying that they were 'deep on the surface'
meaning that there was nothing underneath. — David Denby

So the obvious, then: the liberal arts in general, and especially reading seriously, offer an opening to a wider life, the powers of active citizenship (including the willingness to vote); reading strengthens perception, judgment, and character; it creates understanding of other people and oneself, maybe kindliness and wit, and certainly the ability to endure solitude, both in the common sense of empty-room loneliness and the cosmic sense of empty-universe loneliness. Reading fiction carries you further into imagination and invention than you would be capable of on your own, takes you into other people's lives, and often, by reflection, deeper into your own. I will indulge a resounding tautology: every great civilization, including ours, has had a great literature and great readers. If literature matters less to young people than it once did, we are all in trouble. — David Denby

Life is a dance between making it happen and letting it happen. — Arianna Huffington

The director, Antoine Fuqua, relies on small details, which anchor the vigilante-as-saint myth in at least a minimal degree of reality. — David Denby

I smelt him, smelt Johnny; for a second I thought - what? That he was there, was with me, that he wasn't...But I realised it was his perfume, the one I'd had made specially for him by an artisan perfumer in New York, his own custom-made one-off blend. It had been hideously expensive but I hadn't cared as long as it had pleased him. It was all intense essential oils, layer upon layer of labdanum, patchouli, vanilla, vetiver, ambrette, frankincense, myrrh, amber, Bulgarian rose absolute, Oud wood - the list was endless and beautiful, like a scented prayer. The woman had said some of the ingredients would keep their fragrance for a hundred years, would never die. Like me, he'd said, like us. I'd put some drops of the heavy dark oil on a couple of cotton wool pads and put them in the box when we got it, now the fragrance - strange, narcotic, archaic - filled the room like his ghost, embracing me in memories. — Joolz Denby

Mab Jones' poetry is suffused with a cool wit and a wisdom beyond her years. She is a superb performance poet in the tradition of Joolz Denby and Pam Ayres and, like them, her work is beautifully layered and contains bittersweet depths. — Phill Jupitus

Maybe it's the shadows that beckon, but I've created some of my nastiest work in the middle of the night. — Megan Denby

You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals. — David Denby

The problem of criticism is not judgment but evocation - conveying the particular emotional and visual feel that the movie has. — David Denby

I was shocked. A dying word, "shocked." Few people have been able to use it well since Claude Rains so famously said, "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here," as he pocketed his winnings in Casablanca. But it's the only word for excitement and alarm of this intensity. — David Denby

The greatest all-around American film actor is James Stewart. — David Denby

Trivial details have been summoned, in part, to make a satirical point about upper-middle-class marriage-that the whole thing can slip away between the white wine and the arugula salad. — David Denby

Never throw fruit at someone who understands the theatrics of the situation better than you do. — David Denby

The action comes at us through a buzz of nattering remarks. — David Denby

The trouble with today's snarky pipsqueaks who break off a sentence or two, or who write a couple of mean paragraphs, is that they don't go far enough; they don't have a coherent view of life. Spinning around in the media from moment to moment, they don't stand for anything, push for anything; they're mere opportunists without dedication, and they don't win any victories. — David Denby

An economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders if it would work in theory. — Ronald Reagan

Julia smiled as if he'd given her a present and eagerly sat in it, pulling her legs under herself and curling up like a kitten. Gabriel could swear that he heard her purring. He smiled at the sight of her, momentarily relaxed and almost happy over such a trivial event. — Sylvain Reynard

Who God doth late and early pray, More of his grace than gifts to send, And entertains the harmless day With a well-chosen book or friend. — Henry Wotton

Crash is hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it's easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, though it is not for the fainthearted. — David Denby

For many kids, a good teacher may be the most palpable form of honor they will ever experience. — David Denby

Whether white, black, Asian, or Latino, American students rarely arrive at college as habitual readers, which means that few of them have more than a nominal connection to the past. It is absurd to speak, as does the academic left, of classic Western texts dominating and silencing everyone but a ruling elite or white males. The vast majority of white students do not know the intellectual tradition that is allegedly theirs any better than black or brown ones do. They have not read its books, and when they do read them, they may respond well, but they will not respond in the way that the academic left supposes. For there is only one 'hegemonic discourse' in the lives of American undergraduates, and that is the mass media. Most high schools can't begin to compete against a torrent of imagery and sound that makes every moment but the present seem quaint, bloodless, or dead. — David Denby

I feel a tug in the air. The magic. When I look over, Felicity has her eyes closed in concentration, and a faint smile curves those full lips. Suddenly, Lady Denby breaks wind with an enormous crackling sound. There is no hiding the shock and horror on her face as she realizes what she's done. She breaks wind again, and several women clear their throats and look away as if they can pretend no to notice the offense. — Libba Bray

In rhetoric there are the unconditionally right and the unconditionally guilty; there is total victory and the annihilation of the opponent. In dialogue, annihilation of the opponent also annihilates the very dialogic sphere in which discourse lives... This sphere is very fragile and is easily destroyed... — Mikhail Bakhtin

As governor, I'm spending my time focused in three areas: creating jobs, reducing the expense of government and schools. — Jack Markell

But after children leave their parents' arms, school is still the necessary place for knowledge and soul to spring into life and good teachers are still the instigators of that miracle. — David Denby