Poems List

Stung by the splendor of a sudden thought.

Depend not on another, but lean instead on thyself...True happiness is born of self-reliance.

Anytime I see something screech across a room and latch onto someone's neck, and the guy screams and tries to get it off, I have to laugh, because what IS that thing

Ignorance is not innocence, but sin.

Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Educating a son I should allow him no fairy tales and only a very few novels. This is to prevent him from having 1. the sense of romantic solitude (if he is worth anything he will develop a proper and useful solitude) which identification with the hero gives. 2. cant ideas of right and wrong, absurd systems of honor and morality which never will he be able completely to get rid of, 3. the attainment of ideals, of a priori desires, of a priori emotions. He should amuse himself with fact only: he will then not learn that if the weak younger son do or do not the magical honorable thing he will win the princess with hair like flax.

My thoughts are my company I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them.

We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.

Sometimes I think you have to march right in and demand your rights, even if you don't know what your rights are, or who the person is you're talking to. Then, on the way out, slam the door.

The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.

There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.

A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of government as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by government. Somewhere in between and In gradations is the group that has the sense that gov't exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.

To my daughter Leonora without whose never failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been completed in half the time.

The world's as ugly as sin, and almost as delightful

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing -- he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.

I bet the main reason the police keep people away from a plane crash is they don't want anybody walking in and lying down in the crash stuff, then when somebody comes up act like they just woke up and go, 'What was THAT'

Honor has not to be won it must only not be lost.

Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.

To become oneself, with all one's strength. Difficult. A bomb, a speech, a rifle shot -- and the world can look a different place. And then where is this self