Delmore Schwartz Quotes

Time is the school in which we learn,
time is the fire in which we burn.

Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.

What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning,
if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?

How the false truths of the years of youth have passed!Have passed at full speed like trains which never stoppedThere where I stood and waited,
hardly aware,How little I knew,
or which of them was the oneTo mount and ride to hope or where true hope arrives.

Even paranoids have real enemies.

Major writing is to say that which has been seen,
so that it need never be said again;
so that which has been seen increases,
changes in reality,
in being.

Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage.
Courage is the most desperate,
admirable and noble kind of love.

Poetry must be as new as foam & old as rock.

Order and disorder,
form and formless must have profound psychological roots,
nervous roots.

O your life,
your lonely lifeWhat have you ever done with it,And done with the great gift of consciousness?What will you ever do before Death's knifeProvides the answer ultimate and appropriate?As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,Falls in a parachute,
falls endlessly,
and feels the vastDraft of the abyss sucking him down and down,An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:This is the way the night passes by,
thisIs the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.

How could I think the brief years were enough To prove the reality of endless love?

And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous, He must die a little death each morning, He must swallow his toad and study his vomit as Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.

The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible;
he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself,
yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.

Love is the tact of every good, The only warmth,
the only peace.

Each minute bursts in the burning room,The great globe reels in the solar fire,Spinning the trivial and unique away.(How all things flash! How all things flare!)What am I now that I was then?May memory restore again and againThe smallest color of the smallest day:Time is the school in which we learn,Time is the fire in which we burn.

Where the light is,
and each thing clear,Separate from all others,
standing in its place,I drink the time and touch whatever's near,And hope for day when the whole world has that face:For what assures her present every year?In dark accidents the mind's sufficient grace.

All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.

What does long life avail? The best seats at the funerals of friends.

I admired my father very much...
at the age of sixteen.
But now I see that he was a brutal and cruel man,
- but not without remorse,
and that was what tortured us,
his alternations.

At the moment I'm so exhausted that I feel like cutting my throat,
so the next news masy well be that I am across the river and under the trees: what is the meaning and purpose of life? Death.

I got married the second time in the way that,
when a murder is committed,
crackpots turn up at the police station to confess the crime.

I am of Russian-Jewish distraction.

Literature doesn't matter! The only thing that matters is money and getting your teeth fixed!

Literary Party: A traffic jam of the lost waiting for the ferry across the Styx.

Whence,
if ever,
shall come the actualityOf a voice speaking the mind's knowing,The sunlight bright on the green windowshade,And the self articulate,
affectionate,
and flowing,Ease,
warmth,
light,
the utter showing,When in the white bed all things are made.

Is it not clear that a reviewer's psyche,
like an iceberg,
is seven-eighths beneath the surface?

I always cause those who are near to me more suffering than pleasure.

I am a book I neither wrote nor read.