Delmore Schwartz Quotes
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All poets' wives have rotten lives Their husbands look at them like knives.
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I am of Russian-Jewish distraction.
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What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?
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Order and disorder, form and formless must have profound psychological roots, nervous roots.
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Whence, if ever, shall come the actualityOf a voice speaking the mind's knowing,The sunlight bright on the green windowshade,And the self articulate, affectionate, and flowing,Ease, warmth, light, the utter showing,When in the white bed all things are made.
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All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.
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To be the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe is in itself a special kind of experience; and an important one to an author. He has heard two languages through childhood, the one spoken with ease at home, and the other spoken with ease in the streets and at school, but spoken poorly at home.
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Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.
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I am my father's father,You are your children's guilt.In history's pity and terrorThe child is Aeneas again;Troy is in the nursery,The rocking horse is on fire.Child labor! The child must carryHis fathers on his back.
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Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn.
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How the false truths of the years of youth have passed! Have passed at full speed like trains which never stopped There where I stood and waited, hardly aware, How little I knew, or which of them was the one To mount and ride to hope or where true hope arrives.
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I no more wrote than read that book which is The self I am, half hidden as it is From one and all who see within a kiss The lounging formless blackness of an abyss. How could I think the brief years were enough To prove the reality of endless love?
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Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of love.
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I always cause those who are near to me more suffering than pleasure.
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Sometimes even paranoids have enemies.
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I admired my father very much... at the age of sixteen. But now I see that he was a brutal and cruel man, - but not without remorse, and that was what tortured us, his alternations.
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The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible; he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.
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Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.
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Even paranoids have real enemies.
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In dreams begin responsibilities.
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But this, this which we say before we’re sorry,This which we live behind our unseen faces,Is neither dream, nor childhood, neitherMyth, nor landscape, final, nor finished,For we are incomplete and know no future,And we are howling or dancing out our soulsIn beating syllables before the curtain:We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.
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Where the light is, and each thing clear, Separate from all others, standing in its place, I drink the time and touch whatever's near, And hope for day when the whole world has that face: For what assures her present every year? In dark accidents the mind's sufficient grace.
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That inescapable animal walks with me,Has followed me since the black womb held,Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,A caricature, a swollen shadow,A stupid clown of the spirit's motive,Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,The secret life of belly and bone.