George Oppen Quotes

#1. My wife is a big fan of George Oppen and I got into him. I could have a career like his. It's not an alpha male situation, George Oppen. It's quiet. It's poetry.He just lived a life of an intellectual poet.

Stephen Malkmus

#2. George Oppen is a tough old bird. If you've never seen what [he] sees, it's because you haven't sat still long enough and looked as he has. The things he sees feel like the gnarled bark of a tree. The tree is there too. You can put your weight against it. It won't give.

Carl Rakosi

#3. God speaks to us by speaking through us, and any meaning we arrive at in this life is composed of the irreducible details of the life that is around us at any moment. "I think there is no light in the world / but the world," writes George Oppen. "And I think there is light.

Christian Wiman

#4. George Oppen wasn't a larger than life personality, but I'm not either. And he lived a long time, so he was happy. Going down in flames is fine, too.

Stephen Malkmus

#5. As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.

Paul Auster

#6. [It is not] the poet's business to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth.

George Oppen

#7. A pure mathematical series would be one in which each term is derived from the preceding term by a rule.

George Oppen

#8. When the hammer strikes a nail, the extreme force of the blow on the broad head is transmitted without loss to the point. The head of the nail is the whole of eternity and the point of that nail is pressed to the center of the human heart. " [ quoting Simone Weil from memory ]

George Oppen

#9. In these explanations it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world.'

the rain falls
that had not been falling
and it is the same world

George Oppen

#10. Ultimately the air
Is bare sunlight where must be found
The lyric valuable.

George Oppen

#11. - What are we doing on Earth?

Paulo Coelho

#12. Thus while he spake, each passion dimm'd his face Thrice chang'd with pale, ire, envie and despair, Which marrd his borrow'd visage, and betraid Him counterfet, if any eye beheld.

John Milton

#13. The situation of the Old Left was the theory of Socialist Realism, etc. It seemed pointless to argue. We stayed carefully away from people who wrote for the New Masses.

George Oppen

#14. A discrete series is a series of terms each of which is empirically derived, each one of which is empirically true. And this is the reason for the fragmentary character of those poems.

George Oppen

#15. Things explain each other, not themselves.

George Oppen

#16. I choose not to fight against but to stand for. Not to go against but to go for.

O. Stephen Peart

#17. The chances of a child coming through as I did ... the world is too hard. On the other hand, I would always encourage children of mine if they wanted to be in school plays and dance and sing. But I wouldn't put them to work.

Shelley Fabares

#18. Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.

George Oppen

#19. I think there is no light in the world
but the world

and I think there is light

George Oppen

#20. He was just so gorgeous, erotic, and intimidating at the same time, she said, grinning.

Beth Bares

#21. Among days// Having only the force/ Of days//Most simple/ Most difficult

George Oppen

#22. Truth, also is the pursuit of it.

George Oppen

#23. The modern concept of the unconscious, based on such studies and measurements, is often called the "new unconscious," to distinguish it from the idea of the unconscious that was popularized by a neurologist-turned-clinician named Sigmund Freud.

Leonard Mlodinow

#24. It is necessary to study these words you have written, for the words have a longer history than you have and say more than you know.

George Oppen

#25. Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

George Oppen

#26. The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.

George Oppen

#27. The self is no mystery, the mystery is / That there is something for us to stand on

George Oppen

#28. Only one mistake, Ezra! You should have talked to women.

George Oppen

#29. The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines.

George Oppen

#30. You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

Alan Watts

#31. What I like more than anything is to visit other islands...

George Oppen

#32. There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art.

George Oppen

#33. The true science of martial arts means practicing them in such a way that they will be useful at any time, and to teach them in such a way that they will be useful in all things.

Miyamoto Musashi

#34. One of life's fundamental truths states, 'Ask and you shall receive.' As kids we get used to asking for things, but somehow we lose this ability in adulthood. We come up with all sorts of excuses and reasons to avoid any possibility of criticism or rejection.

Jack Canfield