Top 55 John Berryman Quotes
#1. Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn
John Berryman
#2. The splendour & the lose grew all the same, Sire.
John Berryman
#3. He had tried everything, cutting down (many devices), pipes, cigars, even cold turkey. He had quit once in Rome, for seven hours after breakfast, during the last two of which his (first) wife was begging him to take it up again.
John Berryman
#4. We have reason to be afraid. This is a terrible place.
John Berryman
#5. And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.
John Berryman
#7. Hunger was constitutional with him,
women, cigarettes, liquor, need need need
until he went to pieces.
The pieces sat up & wrote. They did not heed
their piecedom but kept very quietly on
among the chaos.
John Berryman
#8. Yeats knew nothing about life: it was all symbols
& Wordsworthian egotism: Yeats on Cemetery Ridge
would not have been scared, like you & me,
he would have been, before the bullet that was his,
studying the movements of the birds,
said disappointed & amazed Henry.
John Berryman
#9. There is no such thing as Freedom (though it is the most important condition of human life, after Humility, -which does not exist either). There is only Slavery (walls around one) and absence-of-Slavery (ability to walk in any direction, or to remain still).
John Berryman
#11. Two daiquiris withdrew into a corner of a gorgeous room and one told the other a lie.
John Berryman
#13. Springwater grow so thick it gonna clot and the pleasing ladies cease. I figure, yup, you is bad powers.
John Berryman
#14. Offering Dragons quarter is no good, they regrow all their parts and come on again. They have to be killed.
John Berryman
#15. What is the boy now, who has lost his ball, ... I am not a little boy.
John Berryman
#16. I'd gotten used to hallucinations - but who can get used to the doubt that one of those dreadful visions is real?
John Berryman
#17. We are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win.
John Berryman
#18. The high ones die, die. They die. You look up and who's there?
John Berryman
#19. I am the little man who smokes & smokes.
I am the girl who does know better but.
I am the king of the pool.
I am so wise I had my mouth sewn shut.
John Berryman
#20. These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand.
They are only meant to terrify & comfort.
John Berryman
#21. Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.
John Berryman
#22. He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing. Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing.
John Berryman
#23. Wishin' was dyin' but I gotta make it all this way to that bed on these feet.
John Berryman
#24. A mind so dark it made one wonder if the Renaissance had ever really taken place.
John Berryman
#25. That baby has got to learn things
including remaining erect & on deck & all,
her study of herself must include no wings.
She's sturdy, beautiful, & she will do, unless
the universal homage turns her head
as it might well do mine,
hypnotized by the Little Baby ...
John Berryman
#26. I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
John Berryman
#28. Them lady poets must not marry, pal ... It is a true error to marry with poets / or to be by them.
John Berryman
#29. Love her he doesn't but the thought he puts
into that young woman
would launch a national product
complete with TV spots & skywriting
outlets in Bonn & Tokyo
I mean it
John Berryman
#30. One must be ruthless with one's own writing or someone else will be.
John Berryman
#31. I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.
John Berryman
#32. They say we have weak wills. Do you know about the two drunks who went to the film of The Lost Weekend. Came out staggering. "My God I'll never take another drink," said the first. "My God I'll never go to another movie." How's that for commitment?
John Berryman
#33. Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour . I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
John Berryman
#35. The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.
John Berryman
#36. I cry. Evil dissolves, and love, like foam;
that love. Prattle of children powers me home,
my heart claps like the swan's
under a frenzy of who love me and who shine.
John Berryman
#37. General Fatigue stalked in, & a Major-General,
Captain Fatigue, and at the base of all
pale Corporal Fatigue,
and curious microbes came, came viruses:
and the Court conferred on Henry, and conferred on Henry
the rare Order of Weak.
John Berryman
#38. Something has been said for sobriety but very little.
John Berryman
#39. Bats have no bankers and they do not drink and cannot be arrested and pay no tax and, in general, bats have it made.
John Berryman
#40. I ask for a decree
dooming my bitter enemies to laughter
advanced against them.
John Berryman
#41. The serious poet should seek to explore the 'sources' of these global nightmares-and to explore them not just in poetry, but in person. Poetry is a terminal activity, taking place out near the end of things.
John Berryman
#43. The worse anyone feels, the worse treated he is. Fools elect fools.
John Berryman
#44. This world is gradually becoming a place Where I do not care to be any more.
John Berryman
#45. So if I were talking to a young writer, I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.
John Berryman
#46. Listen, for poets are feigned to lie, and I
For you a liar am a thousand times ...
John Berryman
#47. You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.
John Berryman
#50. The only happy people in the world
are those who do not have to write long poems
John Berryman
#51. leave wizard Henry: at his lectern where
he's working on his phantasies: Disperse!
and everything goes worse
so the world fills with her knees, harmful & fair:
a medium where 'Fuck you' comes as no curse
but come as a sigh or a prayer.
John Berryman
#52. During those years he met his seminars,
went & lectured & read, talked with human beings,
paid insurance & taxes;
but his mind was not on it. his mind was elsewheres
in an area where the soul not talks but sings
& where foes are attacked with axes.
John Berryman
#53. I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will depend on my being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia.
John Berryman
#54. The splendour & the lose grew all the same, Sire.
John Berryman
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