WednesdayMay 20, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Come, my songs, let us speak of perfection - We shall get ourselves rather disliked.
When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs I am compelled to conclude That man is the superior animal. When I consider the curious habits of man I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.
Literature is news that stays news.
Great Literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.
America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.
Winter is icumen in, Lhude sing Goddamm, Raineth drop and staineth slop, And how the wind cloth ramm! Sing: Goddamm.
As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.
Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase! Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later ... some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some, pro patria, non 'dulce' non 'et decor' . walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men's lies, the unbelieving came home, home to a lie.
Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one 'Sordello.'
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.
His true Penelope was Flaubert, He fished by obstinate isles.
There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization. Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth's lid, For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books.
The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.
Literature is language charged with meaning.
Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
Hysterias, trench confessions, laughter out of dead bellies.
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. The paired butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older.
With Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting.
No picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper.
Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as 'addled mosses dank'), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing—nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.
Poetry must be as well written as prose.
The ant's a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity, Paquin pull down! The green casque has outdone your elegance.
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
'Tis not need we know our every thought Or see the work shop where each mask is wrought Wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, Careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit And serve our jape's turn for a night or two.
Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man's courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom
For three years, out of key with his time, He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain 'the sublime' In the old sense. Wrong from the start— No, hardly, but seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date.
Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood. Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men!
And the betrayers of language ...... n and the press gang And those who had lied for hire; The perverts, the perverters of language, the perverts, who have set money-lust Before the pleasures of the senses; howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house, the clatter of presses, the blowing of dry dust and stray paper, foetor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges.
See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering! See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened; As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back;
What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell. What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.
Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea.
Genius ... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and where the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.
The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the courtyard, There is not sound of footfall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.
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