Literature and Words

Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Books are made not like children but like pyramids … and they’re just as useless! and they stay in the desert! … Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.

Madame Bovary, c’est moi.

Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Language is fossil poetry.

In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.

Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’.

I gotta use words when I talk to you.

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Speech impelled us

The intolerable wrestle

Words strain,

Oh may I join the choir invisible

Fred’s studies are not very deep … he is only reading a novel.

’Tis sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that here is God’s plenty.

The famous rules, which the French call Des Trots Onitez, or, the Three Unities, which ought to be observed in every regular play; namely, of Time, Place, and Action.

Arms, and the man I sing.

The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,