Top 30 Basil Bunting Quotes
#1. I want my heart to be the thin place. I don't want to board a plane to feel the kiss of heaven. I want to carry it with me wherever I go. I want my fragile, hurting heart, to recognize fleeting kairos, eternal moments as they pass. I want to be my own mountain and my own retreat.
Anna White
#2. Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation.
Basil Bunting
#3. The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.
Basil Bunting
#5. And always the cutting out and the buggering about and the buggering about and the rewriting and so on ...
Basil Bunting
#6. Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate. 166
Basil Bunting
#7. But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.
Basil Bunting
#8. Stoke thy fires, thou Dragon-hearted daughter of flame, Rend the storm with thy mighty wings unfurled, Graciously salute the dawn.
Marc Secchia
#9. To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.
Basil Bunting
#11. I tend to overwrite; I need a good editor.
Wolf Blitzer
#13. Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.
Basil Bunting
#15. I believe that there is much less difference between the author and his works than is currently supposed; it is usually in the physical appearance of the writer,
his manners, his mien, his exterior,
that he falls short of the ideal a reasonable man forms of him
rarely in his mind.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#16. Smack me if we ever get that awful."
"But I smack you so often," she said, "how will you know that's what I'm smacking you for?"
"We shall work out a smacking code.
Gina Damico
#17. I hate Science. It denies a man's responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God's fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast.
Basil Bunting
#18. Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.
Basil Bunting
#19. Fortunately, as we all know, it's impossible for anybody but Jimmy Smith to really sound like Jimmy Smith.
Benmont Tench
#21. It is the obligation of Westboro Baptist Church to put the cup of God's fury to America's lips, and cause America to drink it. And you will drink it!
Fred Phelps
#22. I really wanted to write the way Kubrick makes films - 'Strangelove,' '2001', 'Clockwork Orange', 'Barry Lyndon' - they're all so different.
Philip Kerr
#24. Compose aloud: poetry is a sound. Never explain- your reader is as smart as you. Your reader is not just any reader, but is the rare one with ears in his head.
Basil Bunting
#25. The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet's duty to hold the line.
Basil Bunting
#26. Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought.
Basil Bunting
#27. Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?
Basil Bunting
#28. The mason stirs.
Words!
Pens are too light.
Take a chisel to write.
Basil Bunting
#29. Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.
Basil Bunting
#30. Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.
Basil Bunting
