Great Throughts Treasury

"Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."

"Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one "Sordello.""

"Here is a dirty book worth reading ... a bawdy which will be very useful to put Wyndham and J.J. into their proper cubby holes; cause Miller is sore and without kinks."

"Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts."

"I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later."

"I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know."

"I desired my dust to be mingled with yours forever and forever and forever."

"I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better."

"I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic—I mean my motion."

"I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown."

"I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them."

"I have tried to write Paradise. Do not move. Let the wind speak. That is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made. Let those I love try to forgive what I have made."

"I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible."

"I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation."

"I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti."

"If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point."

"Image—that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."

"In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities; I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality—the principle of order versus the split atom."

"In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries."

"If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays."

"I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you."

"If anybody ever shuts you in Indiana...and you don't at least write some unconstrained something or other, I give up hope for your salvation."

"If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates."

"If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval."

"If Ford Madox Ford were placed stark naked in a room totally empty he would contrive to turn it into a mess."

"Make it new."

"In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular."

"It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week."

"It would be about as easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for him to acquire an Englishness or a Frenchness or a European-ness that is more than half skin deep."

"It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work."

"L'art: Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth, crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes."

"It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserved. This hypothesis would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images."

"Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use."

"It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio."

"M'amour, m'amour. What do I love and where are you? That I lost my center fighting the world. The Dreams clash and are shattered-and that I tried to make a paradise terrestre. I have tried to write Paradise. Do not move. Let the wind speak. That is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made. Let those I love try to forgive what I have made."

"Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity."

"Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."

"Man reading ought to be a man intensely alive. The book ought to be a ball of light in his hands."

"Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents."

"Modern civilization has bred a race with brains like those of rabbits and we who are the heirs of the witch-doctor and the voodoo. We artists who have been so long the despised are about to take over control."

"Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood."

"My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration."

"No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life."

"Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance.. poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music."

"My worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along that spoiled everything."

"No one knows, at sight a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, there's nothing in it. Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me: Don't kick against the pricks, accept opinion. The Nineties tried your game and died, there's nothing in it."

"No teacher has ever failed from ignorance. That is empiric professional knowledge. Teachers fail because they cannot `handle the class.' Real education must ultimately be limited to men how INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding."

"No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job."

"Nothing matter but the quality of the affection—in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind dove sta memoria."

"Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market."