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John Leonard, critic - From the Aging category:
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. (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Artists category:
The life, no matter how traumatic, never explains the work, if the work is any good. (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Books category:
The books we love, love us back. In gratitude, we should promise not to cheat on them - not to pretend we're better than they are; not to use them as target practice... We are reading for our lives, not performing like seals for some fresh fish. (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Brother/Sisterhood category:
We are now a tribe of likelihoods. (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Children category:
Every intelligent child is an amateur anthropologist. The first thing such a child notices is that adults don't make sense. (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Criticism category:
Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite. (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Culture category:
The culture as a whole is losing its individual notes, its diversity. And this is... not only sad, it's devastating. (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Deception category:
We are more inclined to shrug than we are to gasp. Isn't everything a trick? Am I putting you on? (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Fear category:
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. (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Fire category:
There are too many ironies in the fire. (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Freedom category:
The story is that one of the four trained dolphins deployed in Iraq met a wild dolphin and swam off. (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Friendship category:
It takes a long time to grow an old friend. (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Future category:
Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past? (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Magic category:
-The New York Times, 1981...
Everybody remembers his or her first magic show... The attraction of magic, to the amateur magician, derived from the fact that it wasn't magic at all; it was science in the service of illusion. (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Memory category:
In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold. (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Prayer category:
One doesn't shout a prayer. (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Religion category:
Granted, religion is wishful thinking, but there is no other kind of thinking. (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Style category:
The words, the style always reflects a habit of mind. And the habit of mind comes in from a different angle... and then something strange and wonderful happens. And you see things differently. You see a different light is shed on it. (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Writing category:
Books fall from Garry Wills like leaves from a maple tree in a sort of permanent October. (John Leonard, critic)
John Leonard, critic - From the Writing category:
-The New York Times, 1982...
Everybody is forever saying that the essay is dead. This is always said in essays. (John Leonard, critic)
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