Ezra Pound Quotes
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Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism . . . the great masters of the past boasted all they could of it and found it magical.
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A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless, with an animal vigour unlike that of any European crowd that I have ever looked at.
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Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.
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Fit for kings, formal gardens afford an earthly Elysium and the odd impression that we mere men might actually control nature for a time.
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Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
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A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.
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The Garden En robe de parade. - Samain Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia. And round about there is a rabble Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth. In her is the end of breeding. Her boredom is exquisite and excessive. She would like some one to speak to her, And is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion.
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In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
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I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.
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Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea.
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The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.
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Art is to be admired rather than explained. The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not precisely know why I admire a green granite, female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.
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I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.
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We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.
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'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn!
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It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.
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Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family-- Oh how hideous it is To see three generations of one house gathered together! It is like an old tree with shoots, And with some branches rotted and falling.
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Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood. Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men!.
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Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.
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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.
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Seems fairly clear that you fix a breed by LIMITING the amount of alien infiltration. You make a race by homogeneity and by avoiding INbreeding.... No argument has ever been sprouted against it. You like it in dogs and horses.
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Glance is the enemy of vision.
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The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the courtyard, There is not sound of footfall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.
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Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.