Academics From The United States

"Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the "canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked."

"Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem."

"Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness."

"Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed."

"The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness."

"One can imagine a computer simulation of the action of peptides in the hypothalamus that is accurate down to the last synapse. But equally one can imagine a computer simulation of the oxidation of hydrocarbons in a car engine or the action of digestive processes in a stomach when it is digesting pizza. And the simulation is no more the real thing in the case of the brain than it is in the case of the car or the stomach. Barring miracles, you could not run your car by doing a computer simulation of the oxidation of gasoline, and you could not digest pizza by running the program that simulates such digestion. It seems obvious that a simulation of cognition will similarly not produce the effects of the neurobiology of cognition."

"It is apparently very congenial for some people who are professionally concerned with fictional texts to be told that all texts are really fictional anyway, and that claims that fiction differs significantly from science and philosophy can be deconstructed as a logocentric prejudice, and it seems positively exhilarating to be told that what we call "reality" is just more textuality. Furthermore, the lives of such people are made much easier than they had previously supposed, because now they don't have to worry about an author's intentions, about precisely what a text means, or about distinctions within a text between the metaphorical and the literal, or about the distinction between texts and the world because everything is just a free play of signifiers. The upper limit, and I believe the reductio ad absurdum, of this "sense of mastery" conveyed by deconstruction, is in Geoffrey Hartman's claim that the prime creative task has now passed from the literary artist to the critic."

"The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else."

"Life is the art of drawing without an eraser."

"Tax reduction has an almost irresistible appeal to the politician, and it is no doubt also gratifying to the citizen. It means more dollars in his pocket, dollars that he can spend if inflation doesn't consume them first. But dollars in his pocket won't buy him clean streets or an adequate police force or good schools or clear air and water. Handing money back to the private sector in tax cuts and starving the public sector is a formula for producing richer and richer consumers in filthier and filthier communities. If we stick to that formula we shall end up in affluent misery."

"More and more Americans feel threatened by runaway technology, by large-scale organization, by overcrowding. More and more Americans are appalled by the ravages of industrial progress, by the defacement of nature, by man-made ugliness. If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery."

"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all. Such extremism comes easily to men who have doped themselves with delusions of their own unblemished virtue and the rascality of others."

"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."

"One of the reasons why mature people are apt to learn less than young people is that they are willing to risk less. Learning is a risky business, and they do not like failure."

"We have to face the fact that most men and women out there are more stale than they know, more bored than they care to admit."

"History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable."

"I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned campsites over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: "Live in the layers, not on the litter." Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes."

"Things come to me, they speak to me. Stanley Kunitz has had an enormous impact on my life. He once said that poetry is only half language, the other half is a quality of perception, a function of the imagination, a particular form of paying attention. For me, it's a stilling of the self, waiting for this language to speak to me before I utter it."

"I remember something Stanley Kunitz once told me. He said, "Poetry explores depths of thought and feeling that civilization requires for its survival.""

"I love what the poet Stanley Kunitz said about dreaming of “an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.” That pretty much sums up what I most admire in a work of literature."

"In the best painting as in authentic poetry one is aware of moral pressures exerted... choices are important, moral pressure exists to make right and wrong choices."

"The wind sharpened itself on a rock; A voice sang:"

"Yet for this we travelled With hope, and not alone, In the country of ourselves, In a country of bright stone."

"You must believe: a poem is a holy thing — a good poem, that is."

"There's a point where plainness is no longer a virtue, when it becomes excessively bald, wrenched."

"You can't make poetry simply by avoiding clichés."

"Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't."

"The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods."

"There's an element of desperation in the insistence of the graduate student's respect for knowledge — as opposed to wisdom. (p. 95)"

"In our age, if a boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their thinking they want to write. (p. 89)"

"Poetry is not a mere shuffling of dead words or even a corralling of live ones. (p. 89)"

"And I dance with William Blake For love, for Love's sake;And everything comes to One, As we dance on, dance on, dance on."

"God bless the roots! — Body and soul are one! The small become the great, the great the small; The right thing happens to the happy man."

"Let others probe the mystery if they can. Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will — The right thing happens to the happy man."

"I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestow Upon that God who knows what I would know."

"Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire; What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire."

"To whom does this terrace belong? — With its limestone crumbling into fine greyish dust, Its bevy of bees, and its wind-beaten rickety sun-chairs? Not to me, but this lizard, Older than I, or the cockroach."

"Being, not doing, is my first joy."

"A terrible violence of creation, A flash into the burning heart of the abominable; Yet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant, The burning lake turns into a forest pool, The fire subsides into rings of water, A sunlit silence."

"Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit; Too close immediacy an exhaustion"

"I have gone into the waste lonely places Behind the eye."

"How can I rest in the days of my slowness? I've become a strange piece of flesh, Nervous and cold, bird-furtive, whiskery, With a cheek soft as a hound's ear. What's left is light as a seed; I need an old crone's knowing."

"The moon draws back its waters from the shore. By the lake's edge, I see a silver swan, And she is what I would. In this light air, Lost opposites bend down — Sing of that nothing of which all is made, Or listen into silence, like a god."

"I lived with deep roots once: Have I forgotten their ways — The gradual embrace Of lichen around stones?"

"The night wind rises. Does my father live? Dark hangs upon the waters of the soul. My flesh is breathing slower than a wall. Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love."

"Is pain a promise? I was schooled in pain, And found out what I could of all desire; I weep for what I'm like when I'm alone In the deep center of the voice and fire.I know the motion of the deepest stone. Each one's himself, yet each one's everyone."

"Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay: I'm martyr to a motion not my own; What's freedom for? To know eternity. I swear she cast a shadow white as stone. But who would count eternity in days? These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: (I measure time by how a body sways.)"

"I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain!"

"This shaking keeps me steady. I should know. What falls away is always. And is near. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go."

"Great Nature has another thing to do To you and me; so take the lively air, And, lovely, learn by going where to go."