Top 32 Guy Davenport Quotes
#2. The meaning of the world, said Wittgenstein, is outside the world. Events and values are distinguishable only in relation to others. A totality of events and values, the world itself, requires another.
Guy Davenport
#3. Something of the previous state, however, survives every change. This is called in the language of cybernetics (which took it form the language of machines) feedback, the advantages of learning from experience and of having developed reflexes.
Guy Davenport
#4. I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.
Guy Davenport
#5. Olson's Maximus and Zukofsky's 'A' are too symbolically and verbally complex, respectively, to command large audiences especially in an age when a college degree is becoming a certificate of illiteracy.
Guy Davenport
#6. There's nothing like being a soldier for confidence or learning your limits or enduring utter humiliation.
Guy Davenport
#7. The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.
Guy Davenport
#8. The birds suffer their suffering each in a lifetime, forgetting it as they go.
Guy Davenport
#9. Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.
Guy Davenport
#10. How can I shake and dispel the awful reputation of being an "erudite" writer? I'm about as erudite as a traffic cop. I like to know things; what's so two-headed peculiar about that?
Guy Davenport
#11. A boar is a very special kind of animal whose bristling is a thing unto itself, and his nape, like a snake's neck, is more a word than a reality.
Guy Davenport
#12. Avoid the suave flow of prose that's the trademark of the glib writer. An easy and smooth style is all very well, but it takes no chances and has no seductive wrinkles, no pauses for thought.
Guy Davenport
#13. Of the autistically interior, dreaming, reading, erotic, self-sufficient child in Balthus' painting we have practically no image at all. Balthus' children are not being driven to succeed where their parents failed, or to be popular, adjusted, or a somebody.
Guy Davenport
#14. I never intended to be a teacher. I just like going to school and learning things.
Guy Davenport
#15. The real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one's mind in the workings of another sensibility.
Guy Davenport
#16. Bonnie Jean (who thinks all philosophers are idiots) has this quarrel with Wittgenstein, who in several places says that reddish green is inconceivable. Yet every summer, when our peppers are drying from green to red, one can see an intermediate stage that is precisely reddish green.
Guy Davenport
#17. Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day.
Guy Davenport
#18. Imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch and must get drunk again to find it.
Guy Davenport
#19. As long as you have ideas, you can keep going. That's why writing fiction is so much fun: because you're moving people about, and making settings for them to move in, so there's always something there to keep working on.
Guy Davenport
#20. Sometimes when reading Goethe I have a paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.
Guy Davenport
#21. Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.
Guy Davenport
#22. Originality houses many rooms, and the views from the windows are all different.
Guy Davenport
#23. I've carved the puppet, and I manipulate the strings, but while it's on stage, the show belongs to the puppet.
Guy Davenport
#24. In curved Einsteinian space we are at all times, technically, looking at the back of our own head.
Guy Davenport
#25. Nothing now exists that is so valuable as whatever theoretically might replace it.
Guy Davenport
#26. Art knows neither doctrine nor idea; its nature is to show.
Guy Davenport
#27. Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its maker's attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.
Guy Davenport
#28. Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world.
Guy Davenport
#29. A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.
Guy Davenport
#30. We will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture's way of developing an individual.
Guy Davenport
#31. My view, as one who taught it, is that the whole purpose of a literary education should be to tell people that these things exist. I don't think any teacher should try to 'teach an author,' but rather simply describe what the author has written. And this is what I tried to do.
Guy Davenport
#32. I was thought to be retarded as a child, and all the evidence indicates that I was.
Guy Davenport
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