Brigid Brophy > Quotes

“Whenever people say, 'We mustn't be sentimental,' you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, 'We must be realistic,' they mean they are going to make money out of it.”
― Brigid Brophy

“Sentimentalist” is the abuse with which people counter the accusation that they are cruel, thereby implying that to be sentimental is worse than to be cruel, which it isn’t.”
― Brigid Brophy

“In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one's surface interest then it has failed. Whatever else it may or may not be, art is also entertainment. Bad art fails to entertain. Good art does something in addition.”
― Brigid Brophy, Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without

“The popular distinction between 'constructive' and 'destructive' criticism is a sentimentality: the mind too weak to perceive in what respects the bad fails is not strong enough to appreciate in what the good succeeds. To be without discrimination is to be unable to praise. The critic who lets you know that he always looks for something to like in works he discusses is not telling you anything about the works or about art; he is saying 'see what a nice person I am.”
― Brigid Brophy, Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without

“When sonneteering Wordsworth re-creates the landing of Mary Queen of Scots at the mouth of the Derwent -

Dear to the Loves, and to the Graces vowed,
The Queen drew back the wimple that she wore

- he unveils nothing less than a canvas by Rubens, baroque master of baroque masters; this is the landing of a TRAGIC Marie de Medicis.
Yet so receptive was the English ear to sheep-Wordsworth's perverse 'Enough of Art' that it is not any of these works of supreme art, these master-sonnets of English literature, that are sold as picture postcards, with the text in lieu of the view, in the Lake District! it is those eternally, infernally sprightly Daffodils.”
― Brigid Brophy, Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without

“O I'm so afraid that it's true about to travel hopefully being better than to arrive. It might be all in the quest, all in the search, all in the anticipation. When it came, there might be nothing there.”
― Brigid Brophy, The King of a Rainy Country

“Manners are for those who have neither beauty or talent but want people to like them despite their lack of attractions”
― Brigid Brophy, Pussy Owl

“I told some imprecisely imagined interlocutor that each year I hoped to have outgrown being moved by the autumn and each year I hadn't”
― Brigid Brophy, The King of a Rainy Country