Ezra Pound Quotes
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Presentation, not reference.
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With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
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If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
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And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
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Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit.
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I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.
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The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
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Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
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The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.
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The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.
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Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.
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The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
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And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.
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What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.
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As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, When the hot water gives out or goes tepid, So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.
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The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
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Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.
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Rhythm must have meaning.
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Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
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Any damn fool can be spontaneous.
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Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
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Wars are made to make debt.
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Literature is news that stays news.
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See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering! See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened; As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back.