Academics From The United States

"In her book, Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer remarks that certain ideas burst upon the intellectual landscape with a tremendous force. They resolve so many fundamental problems at once that they seem also to promise that they will resolve all fundamental problems, clarify all obscure issues. Everyone snaps them up as the open sesame of some new positive science, the conceptual center-point around which a comprehensive system of analysis can be built. The sudden vogue of such a grande ideé, crowding out almost everything else for a while, is due, she says, “to the fact that all sensitive and active minds turn at once to exploiting it. We try it in every connection, for every purpose, experiment with possible stretches of its strict meaning, with generalizations and derivatives.”"

"Bring me your children hither. … Unto this twain, man-child and womanchild, I give the passion of this element; This seed of longing, substance of this love; This power, this purity, this annihilation. Let their hands light the altar of the world. 'T is yours forever. I have brought it home!"

"Passion is power, And, kindly tempered, saves. All things declare Struggle hath deeper peace than sleep can bring."

"Time softly there Laughs through the abyss of radiance with the gods."

"Hark, below, the many-voiced earth, The chanting of the old religious trees, Rustle of far-off waters, woven sounds Of small and multitudinous lives awake, Peopling the grasses and the pools with joy, Uttering their meaning to the mystic night!"

"The gods despise enforcèd offerings. When the heart brings its dearest and its last Then only will they hear—if then, if then!"

"The complexity of women's undergarments in nineteenth-century America is not to be waved off, and I proceeded like a polar explorer through clips, clasps, and moorings, catches, straps, and whalebone stays, sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness."

"I was raised in a fairly strict religious family and attended 16 years of Catholic schools. I feel now that my sense of the spiritual is directly connected to my sense of wonder, my ability to be amazed by the fact of my existence in all its vital impermanence AND by the spectacular environment I wake up to every morning. I am guessing that this sense of wonder is what the creator, if there is one, is still feeling."

"Wars begin through greed and vanity and are continued through the insanity of nationalism in which the boundaries of a land replace God."

"The underlying theme of Western poetry is mortality. The theme of carpe diem asks us to seize the day because we have only a limited number of them. To see life through the lens of death is to approach the condition of gratitude for the gift (or simply the fact) of our existence. And as Wallace Stevens said, Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers."

"The person in the poem is a character like a character in fiction whom the poet has invented--without clothes or a family, or a place of birth, just a voice--to convey himself. Any resemblance he bears to the poet you meet on a signing line is slightly less than coincidental. Meeting the author is one of life's most reliably disappointing experiences, not because authors are such nasty people, but because you have already met them under the best possible circumstance--on the page."

"I find it impossible to think of "favorite" poets. I would rather list the ones I cannot stand."

"Poetry in America is no longer a dirty word. While it is still far from the center of the culture, it is moving slowly inward from the margins. I believe more and more people are shedding their outmoded notions of poetry as an exotic hobby--the result of bad teaching and worse public image problems--and coming to the realization that poetry is about their lives. Poetry is about them."

"It is important for the poet not to be emotional because you cannot see the world clearly with tears in your eyes."

"For the translator of poetry, there is no activity that brings you into a closer, more intimate contact with language, both the second language and your own language, which translation allows you to experience freshly. Of course, translation is the impossible art which is why it attracts often the best minds, at least those driven by difficulty. The best metaphor I know for translation is from my friend Eamon Grennan, who translated the poems of Leopardi. It's like walking in a clear mountain stream, looking at colorful stones in the water. You find one so gorgeous, you put it in your pocket, take it home and put it on a shelf. In the morning you are surprised that the stone looks so dull and without luster. You have the stone, but you have removed it from the water of its home language so it has lost its luster."

"Novelists, playwrights, painters and others may hold in their heads the expectation of fame, but not poets. Having chosen that road, all one can dream of is the jealousy of one's rivals. Celebrity is unexpected and almost unseemly--it forces one to wear a constant look of chagrin, if that is possible. Unless you are Byron, who was the first poet to become a star. At its worst, fame means being known by strangers--enough to bring on waves of paranoia."

"This is the beginning. Almost anything can happen. This is where you find the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land, the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page. Think of an egg, the letter A, a woman ironing on a bare stage as the heavy curtain rises. This is the very beginning."

"You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and — somehow — the wine."

"But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest."

"I love the sound of the bone against the plate and the fortress-like look of it lying before me in a moat of risotto, the meat soft as the leg of an angel who has lived a purely airborne existence. And best of all, the secret marrow, the invaded privacy of the animal prized out with a knife and wallowed down with cold, exhilarating wine."

"But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her,barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor. She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light."

"“We’ll have fun without you”"

"We realised that the version of the world they had rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass, they didn't give a damn about lawns."

"The girls were right in choosing to love Trip, because he was the only boy who could keep his mouth shut."

"A series of dissolves, their house, street, city, country, and finally planet, which not only dwarfs but obliterates them."

"It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together."

"So much has been written about the girls in the newspapers, so much has been said over back-yard fences, or related over the years in psychiatrists’ offices, that we are certain only of the insufficiency of explanations."

"Vince Fusilli held up his lighter… It was the best we could do for an eternal flame."

"Everybody had a story as to why she tried to kill herself. Mrs. Buell said the parents were to blame. "That girl didn't want to die," she told us. "She just wanted out of that house." Mrs. Scheer added, "she wanted out of that decorating scheme.""

"The flagpole that had flown at half-mast the day Cecilia died, though it had been summer and no one but the lawn crew had noticed"

"The small statue of a girl… donated in memory of Laura White, her bronze skirt just beginning to oxidize. Scars crossed her welded wrists, symbolically, but the Lisbon girls didn’t notice."

"You don’t understand me… I’m a teenager. I’ve got problems!"

"The room’s changes- water bugs adhering to walls, one bobbing dead mouse- only heightened what hadn’t changed"

"Cecilia’s party had never been cleaned up. The paper tablecloth, spotted with mice droppings… A brownish scum of punch… sprinkled with flies… A profusion of withered balloons hung from the ceiling… The domino game still called for a three or a seven."

"The blue slate roof… visibly darkened. The yellow bricks turned brown… There were other signs of creeping desolation. The illuminated doorbell went out. The bird feeder fell in the back yard and was left on the ground… Mrs Higbie insisted that Mr Lisbon, using a long pole, had closed the outside shutters."

"We asked Father Moody whether he had discussed Cecilia’s death or the girls’ grief, but he said he hadn’t."

"“Obviously, Doctor… you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.""

"We had never known them. They had brought us here to find that out."

"They knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all."

"“None of my daughters lacked for any love. We had plenty of love in our house.”"

"“I knew I had to close that window or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever.”"

"We realized that our fathers, brothers and uncles had been lying, and that .no one was ever going to love us for our good grades."

"All things, in all their aspects, consist exclusively of 'souls', that is, of various kinds of subjects, or units of experiencing, with their qualifications, relations, and groupings, or communities."

"Too many intellectuals look down on religion and think it will go away. God is not going to go away. There are far more religious people in the world today than when I was born."

"I had a happy, idyllic, old-fashioned childhood. Go to the town where I spent that childhood, you will not find my happy hours there. Yet they remain definite constituents of a divine reality about which true statements can still be made. My happy childhood was a gift my parents and the world offered to God."

"[W]e live in a century in which everything has been said. The challenge today is to learn which statements to deny."

"Hitler made it impossible to keep believing in pacifism, which was one of the many terrible things he did to the world."

"The world has too many automobiles and televisions. Now the standard is there should be one car and TV for every person. This is not healthy for the environment or our souls."

"Musicians who have listened to birds believe [that birds derive pleasure from singing] much more than ornithologists, who are terrified of being accused of anthropomorphism... Having studied thousands of hours of birdsong from around the world, I am convinced some species possess an aesthetic sense, however limited compared to ours. It is part of human egotism to believe that only we have active minds."

"What we need is to make a renewed attempt to worship the objective of God, not our forefathers' doctrines about him."