Literature and Words

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 is about as much a “criticism of life” as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.

[ Socrates speaking :] If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. . . . And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.

The poet is a pretender.

Wit invents ; inspiration reveals .

Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte .

[ When asked about the most beautiful words in the English language :] The ones I like . . . are “cheque” and “inclosed.”

Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.

One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.

I get a little Verlaine

As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.

An excellent quotation can annihilate entire pages, indeed an entire book, in that it warns the reader and seems to cry out to him: “Beware, I am the jewel and around me there is lead, pallid, ignominious lead!”

When his work opens its mouth, the author has to shut his.

Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.

One of those “Two Cultures” is really nothing but utilitarian technology; the other is B-grade novels, ideological fiction, popular art. Who cares if there exists a gap between such “physics” and such “humanities”?

Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften .

Thus anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken.

I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician.

Le Malade Imaginaire .

Grammar, which knows how to control even kings.

Par ma foi! il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j’en susse rien .

All that is not prose is verse; and all that is not verse is prose.

There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.