Quote collection
114 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I don't know that we really think any thoughts; we think connections between thoughts. That's where the mind moves, that's what's new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people's heads for a long time."
"Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt - less and less sharp and biting into you."
"We're talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. Starting over with accuracy."
"A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen."
"What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning."
"What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall."
"Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion."
"That night we made love "the real way" which we had not yet attempted although married six months. Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not sure we got it right. He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully. Early next day I wrote a short talk ("On Defloration") which he stole and had published in a small quarterly magazine. Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us. Or should I say ideal. Neither of us had ever seen Venice."
"You used to say. "Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness." Madness doubled is marriage I added when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce a golden rule."
"He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew."
"What would it be like to live in a library of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor and all the punctuation settled to the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure."
"Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you've made something, it'll - the world will be different."
"Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope."
"Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches. Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt. He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds. I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside."
"Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate."
"The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind."
"Do you remember when they taught cursive in schools? I think they don't anymore. But I still enjoy it - just the physical act and all the - the whole business of making a thing out of language."
"Poetry - poiesis means a thing made."
"Now every mortal has pain and sweat is constant, but if there is anything dearer than being alive, it's dark to me. We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life. We know no other. The underworld's a blank and all the rest just fantasy."
"He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet."