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Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
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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.
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The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
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Poetry must be as well written as prose.
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A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
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The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
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Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.
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What counts is the cultural level.
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Rhythm is form cut into time.
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The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.
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The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.
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Religion I have defined as "Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art".
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The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough.
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The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.
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Don't be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.
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People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
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Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.
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And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass.
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It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work. Image...that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.
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Quiet this metal! Let the manes put off their terror, let them put off their aqueous bodies with fire. Let them assume the milk-white bodies of agate. Let them draw together the bones of the metal.
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To say that a state cannot pursue its aims because there is no money, is like saying that an engineer cannot build roads, because there are no kilometers.
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We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to ’the needs of society’, or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.
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Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a 'country run by Jews,'
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There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.