Top 37 Empson Quotes
#1. The effect of reading literary non-fiction that matters most to me is when the coin drops, and this happens in the company of the great, mercuric, encyclopedic minds: Empson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye.
Paul Fry
#2. I find what I do for a living really funny. I mean, acting is kind of a hilarious thing for a grown man to call a job.
Christian Bale
#3. Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
William Empson
#4. Buddhists and Christians contrive to agree about death Making death their ideal basis for different ideals. The Communists however disapprove of death Except when practical.
William Empson
#5. It seems unpleasantly refined to put things off till someone knows.
William Empson
#8. The difficult part of good temper consists in forbearance, and accommodation to the ill-humors of others.
William Empson
#10. Islamic fundamentalism in its activist manifestation is bad news. Religious fundamentalism in general is bad news. We know about religious fundamentalism in South Africa. Calvinist fundamentalism has been an unmitigated force of benightedness in our history.
J.M. Coetzee
#11. That's the problem. We let people say stuff, and they say it so much that it becomes okay to them and normal for us. What's the point of having a voice if you're gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn't be? "Maya?
Angie Thomas
#12. The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.
William Empson
#14. Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.
William Empson
#16. All those large dreams by which men long live well Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell.
William Empson
#17. With his eyes squinted to slits, Donny reminds me of Clint Eastwood, if Clint Eastwood were eight inches shorter, thirty pounds heavier, less good-looking, with male-pattern baldness, and badly scarred.
Dean Koontz
#18. The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.
William Empson
#19. Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves; Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems; Earth's vast hot iron, cold space's empty waves.
William Empson
#20. You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there.
William Empson
#21. I'm afraid I take ... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been.
William Empson
#22. Nothing is good for everyone, but only relatively to some people.
Andre Gide
#23. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.
Oscar Wilde
#24. When I was either 7 or 8 years old, I did a sketch every day of my teacher and what she wore. At the end of the year, I gave her the sketchbook. For me, the sketching of dresses was about fantasy and dreams.
Alber Elbaz
#25. Our gods are much too busy in our lives for us to ignore them. (Myles)
Tamora Pierce
#26. Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry
William Empson
#27. Hansie Cronje. Honestly. I got out to Hansie more than anyone.I never knew what to do with him
Sachin Tendulkar
#30. Shall I make it clear, boys, for all to apprehend, Those that will not hear, boys, waiting for the end, Knowing it is near, boys, trying to pretend, Sitting in cold fear, boys, waiting for the end?
William Empson
#31. Proust has listed a great many reasons why it is impossible to be happy, but, in the course of being happy, one finds it difficult to remember them.
William Empson
#32. The natural consequences of unearned wealth in undisciplined hands.
Ariel Allison
#33. Liberal hopefulness Regards death as a mere border to an improving picture.
William Empson
#34. To produce pure proletarian art the artist must be at one with the worker; this is impossible, not for political reasons, but because the artist never is at one with any public.
William Empson
#35. I thought you made coffee." "We do. We also fight crime. Don't you read the papers?
Kristen Ashley
#36. This world is good enough for me, if only I can be good enough for it.
William Empson
#37. I think many people (like myself) prefer to read poetry mixed with prose;
it gives you more to go by; the conventions of poetry have been getting
far off from normal life, so that to have a prose bridge makes
reading poetry seem more natural.
William Empson
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
