Brad Leithauser Quotes
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If one were forced to select a single word to exemplify Bishop's peculiar charm and power, it might well be 'No.'
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If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.
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I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth's ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.
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I cling to the optimistic belief that the haphazard and the hopscotch, the creature that sips among many flowers, may actually come up with something.
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To my mind, it’s one of the deepest gratifications the poet or fiction writer knows. I mean, the internal stumbling upon some satisfactory answer to the question, What is this like? Or, What does this remind me of? A comparison is laboriously but successfully introduced. You meet your metaphor, and it’s good.
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For it is humanly certain that most of us remember very little of what we have read. To open almost any book a second time is to be reminded that we had forgotten well-nigh everything that the writer told us. Parting from the narrator and his narrative, we retain only a fading impression; and he, as it were, takes the book away from us and tucks it under his arm.
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It is the good who do not sleep.