Delmore Schwartz Quotes

#1. Time is the fire in which we burn. - Delmore Schwartz

Connie Willis

#2. Call us what you will: we are made such by love.

Delmore Schwartz

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

Delmore Schwartz

#4. Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.

Delmore Schwartz

#5. Even paranoids have real enemies.

Delmore Schwartz

#6. 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.

Delmore Schwartz

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

Delmore Schwartz

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

Delmore Schwartz

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

Delmore Schwartz

#10. For reality's glow and glory, without poetry,
Fade, like the red operas of sunset

Delmore Schwartz

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

Delmore Schwartz

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

Delmore Schwartz

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

Delmore Schwartz

#14. 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.

Delmore Schwartz

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

Delmore Schwartz

#16. 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.

Delmore Schwartz

#17. 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.

Delmore Schwartz

#18. 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.

Delmore Schwartz

#19. Sometimes even paranoids have enemies.

Delmore Schwartz

#20. To be the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe is in itself a special kind of experience; and an important one to an author. He has heard two languages through childhood, the one spoken with ease at home, and the other spoken with ease in the streets and at school, but spoken poorly at home.

Delmore Schwartz

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

Delmore Schwartz

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

Delmore Schwartz

#23. 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.

Delmore Schwartz

#24. All poets' wives have rotten lives Their husbands look at them like knives.

Delmore Schwartz

#25. I am of Russian-Jewish distraction.

Delmore Schwartz

#26. 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.

Delmore Schwartz

#27. 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.

Delmore Schwartz

#28. Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
(Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day)

Delmore Schwartz

#29. I am a book I neither wrote nor read.

Delmore Schwartz

#30. 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?

Delmore Schwartz

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

Delmore Schwartz

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

Delmore Schwartz