Frederick Seidel Quotes

#1. Satan's warming me a throne, that's how long [I've been watching you]. Not a chair, not a seat at the bar. The big guy's got a throne with my name on it.

Sarah Winter

#2. I didn't want to lose my sense of myself in my profession.

Marissa Mayer

#3. Usually I can hear the pianos, the saxophone, and usually I can hear Ronnie. But I really need to listen to Keith and Mick. The rest of the band is sort of an embellishment to that.

Charlie Watts

#4. I've always had an interest in complicating the way that we perceive the black character, whether it's the black academic or scholar or activist or black intellectual.

Rashid Johnson

#5. Write beautifully what people don't want to hear.

Frederick Seidel

#6. July 4th fireworks exhale over the Hudson sadly.
It is beautiful that they have to disappear.
It's like the time you said I love you madly.
That was an hour ago. It's been a fervent year.

Frederick Seidel

#7. I like poems that are daggers that sing. I like poems that for all the power of the sentiments expressed, and all the power to upset and offend, are so well made that they're achieved things. However much they upset you, they also affect you.

Frederick Seidel

#8. It is always noteworthy that all those who seriously study this science [the theory of numbers] conceive a sort of passion for it.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

#9. Sometimes when an idea flashes, you distrust it because it seems too easy. You qualify it with all kinds of evasive phrases because you're timid about it. But often, this turns out to be the best idea of all.

Saul Bass

#10. I like to hear the sound of form, and I like to hear the sound of it breaking.

Frederick Seidel

#11. The lights and shades, whose well-accorded strife gives all the strength and color of our life.

Alexander Pope

#12. Joe Lelyveld told me just now that Gandhi and Mussolini
Actually met. What an extraordinary thought.

Frederick Seidel

#13. Child of the kindly West, I have come to know, if more of us valued your ways - food and cheer above hoarded gold - it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#14. Sometimes you finish the poem, and that last piece clicks in place. Sometimes the poem is finished with you.

Frederick Seidel

#15. Too much is almost enough

Frederick Seidel

#16. I feel intensely guilty for working ... You have to be able to provide for your kids. But I feel like it's a weird modern phenomenon that you always feel guilty for it.

Melissa McCarthy

#17. Don't you think we're oversexed?" "You're the shrink," I said. "You tell me." "Yes," she said. "I believe we are." "What should we do about it?" I said. "Encourage the pathology," Susan said, and smiled her rebelangel smile at me.

Robert B. Parker

#18. I tend to think of a myth and then explore how it would play out if it were happening in the modern-day world. I modify all the myths I use, but I stick very closely to their structure - it is the hidden teacher in me.

Rick Riordan

#19. Oh my God! Lucas is going to kill you. He's going to murder you and hide the body. I'm going to know about it, I'm going to be an accomplice!" I shouted. "Shhh...

M. Robinson

#20. Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.

Christopher Lasch

#21. I believe that as we face unparalleled prosperity in some quarters and deep impoverishment in others, it is the willingness of the next generation to bridge the gap between the two that will return us to our sense of purpose and focus.

Lynn Schusterman

#22. You need a danger to be safe in.

Frederick Seidel

#23. I was left with myself and had to do the one thing I could to survive. I knew it would be difficult to write, very difficult, but I set about doing it.

Frederick Seidel