Quote collection
319 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it."
"The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain."
"It was the only way to progress, to stop."
"Sometimes I wonder if I'm in my right mind. Then it passes off and I'm as intelligent as ever."
"Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me."
"Estragon: I can't go on like this. Vladimir: That's what you think."
"My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin."
"The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness around me I feel less alone. (Pause.) In a way. (Pause.) I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to... (hesitates) ...me. (Pause.)"
"Yes, light, there is no other word for it."
"I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end."
"Where am I, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."
"Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of the spiritual; Poetry is all passionate and feeling and animates the inanimate; Metaphysics are most perfect when concerned with universals; Poetry, when most concerned with particulars."
"You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one without almost without bothering to read the other."
"Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday."
"The time is perhaps not altogether too green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear, and more than the light of day (or night) makes the subsolar, -lunar, and -stellar excrement. Art is the sun, moon, and stars of the mind, the whole mind."
"The loss of my sight was a great fillip. If I could go deaf and dumb I think I might pant on to be a hundred."
"I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe in them. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine . . . "Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved; do not presume: one of the thieves was damned." That sentence had a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters."
"We are all born; some remain so."
"Habit is a compromise effected between an individual and his environment."
"I try. I fail. I try again. I fail better."