Top 56 Charles Olson Quotes
#1. I feel the most natural thing is for music to come that way because it's sort of like poetry. Though I do think with poets that I like, like Charles Olson or Ezra Pound, they were rewriting constantly, until the poem becomes a diamond.But with music I don't really feel that way.
Stephen Malkmus
#2. There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only/ eyes in all heads,/ to be looked out of.
Charles Olson
#3. My life
has been given its orders: the seasons
seize
the soul and the body, and make mock
of any dispersed effort. The hour of death
is the only trespass
Charles Olson
#4. Whatever you have to say, leave The roots on, let them Dangle And the dirt Just to make clear Where they come from.
Charles Olson
#5. You can do anything, literally, right? That's one of the exciting possibilities of the present.
Charles Olson
#8. I am happy to have some friends here in the kitchen.
Charles Olson
#9. I have had to learn the simplest things
last. Which made for difficulties.
Charles Olson
#10. If he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share.
Charles Olson
#11. Dead, hung up indoors, the kingfisher
will not indicate a favoring wind,
or avert the thunderbolt.
Charles Olson
#12. I remember way back when I was young, 10 years ago.
Charles Olson
#13. I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.
Charles Olson
#14. You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to tell the truth because to some extent it's false.
Charles Olson
#17. The original in man is that which articulates him from the very outset upon something other than himself.
Charles Olson
#20. By night only crazy things
like the full moon and the whippoorwill
and us, are busy.
Charles Olson
#21. The heroes of the present will retreat to the imitation they are anyhow.
Charles Olson
#23. I hope you're representing the devil's advocate.
Charles Olson
#24. What pudor pejorocracy affronts
how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot
what breeds where dirtiness is law
what crawls
below
Charles Olson
#25. This morning of the small snow I count the blessings, the leak in the faucet which makes of the sink time, the drop of the water on water.
Charles Olson
#26. You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.
Charles Olson
#27. The body
whips the soul. In its great desire
it demands the elixir
In the roar of spring,
transmutations.
Charles Olson
#28. What can we do
when even the public conveyances
sing?
how can we go anywhere,
even cross-town
how get out of anywhere
Charles Olson
#29. I'm sorry, but I was born with a towel on my head.
Charles Olson
#30. When will government cease being a nuisance to everybody?
Charles Olson
#31. Love is form, and cannot be without
important substance
Charles Olson
#32. This
is the abstract, this
is the cold doing, this
is the almost impossible
Charles Olson
#33. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.
Charles Olson
#34. O.K. I'm running out of appetite. Let this swirl - a bit like Crab Nebula - do for now.
Charles Olson
#36. The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.
Charles Olson
#37. This country has been unconscious, and it's got to awake. That's my belief.
Charles Olson
#38. Not one death but many,
not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-back is
the law
Charles Olson
#40. The flowers are ravined
by bees, the fruit blossoms
are thrown to the ground, the wind
the rain forces everything.
Charles Olson
#41. All that matters is that the thing be the thing of the thing.
Charles Olson
#43. A poem is a 'line' between any two points in creation.
Charles Olson
#44. I was playing catch with the European audience.
Charles Olson
#45. We're all moving, moving, moving. Isn't it nice?
Charles Olson
#48. I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.
Charles Olson
#49. And all now is war
where so lately there was peace,
and the sweet brotherhood, the use
of tilled fields.
Charles Olson
#50. ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION
Charles Olson
#51. I take space to be the central fact to man born in America. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy.
Charles Olson
#52. There is a grace of life which is still yours, my dear Europe.
Charles Olson
#53. Of rhythm is image/ of image is knowing/ of knowing there is/ a construct
Charles Olson
#54. One loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born.
Charles Olson
#55. An American is a complex of occasions, themselves a geometry of spatial nature.
Charles Olson
#56. Is it not the play of the mind we are after? Is it not that that shows a mind is there at all?
Charles Olson
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
