Lopate's Quotes

#1. The trick is to realize that one is not important, except insofar as one's example can serve to elucidate a more widespread human trait and make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish.

Phillip Lopate

#2. Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
- Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library

Phillip Lopate

#3. Freedom is a subset of survival.

Toba Beta

#4. God will himself one day hold all humans, and all human governments, to account, but the church has the responsibility in the present to speak words of truth and judgment in advance of that final holding-to-account.

N. T. Wright

#5. What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph,

Phillip Lopate

#6. This is my third time here," she confides in me. "My third episode."
"Episode."
"That's what they call it."
"More like miniseries.

Neal Shusterman

#7. The knowledge that my discriminations are skewed and not always universally desirable doesn't stop me in the least from making them.

Phillip Lopate

#8. I am apt to be harsh in my secret judgments of others, seeing them as defective because they are not enough like me.

Phillip Lopate

#9. And Lopate's anthology helped a lot too. It came out the same year I started grad school, and I remember the book's publication feeling eventful and celebratory. It got a ton of attention for giving voice to this form that had sort of slipped between the cracks. That was exciting to see.

John D'Agata

#10. Think of a dinner party as a club of revolutionaries, a technocratic elite whose social interactions that night are a dry run for some future takeover of the state.

Phillip Lopate

#11. The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work I can think of than taking myself off to somewhere pleasant, where I am forced to stay for hours and 'have fun'.

Phillip Lopate

#12. Tango tipped his head back against the bench, staring up at the denim-colored evening sky. This was the most dangerous, the most wonderful, the most daring addiction of all: life.

Lauren Gilley

#13. I like the freedom that comes with lowered expectations.

Phillip Lopate

#14. The solution to entrapment in the narcissistic hothouse of self is to not relinquish autobiographical writing, but to expand the self by bringing one's curiosity to interface with more and more history and the present world.

Phillip Lopate

#15. Anyone who recommends attention to the moment as a prescription for grateful wonder is only telling half the truth. To be happy one must pay attention, but to be unhappy one must also have paid attention.

Philip Lopate

#16. I vowed that I would always respect the right of an individual to kill himself. Whether suicide was a moral or immoral act I no longer felt sure, but of the dignity of its intransigence I was convinced.

Phillip Lopate

#17. The dinner party is a suburban form of entertainment. Its spread in our big cities represents an insidious Fifth Column suburbanization of the metropolis.

Phillip Lopate

#18. I risked much, but I made much.

P.T. Barnum

#19. In the best nonfiction, it seems to me, you're always made aware that you are being engaged with a supple mind at work. The story line or plot in nonfiction consists of the twists and turns of a thought process working itself out.

Phillip Lopate

#20. Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.

Phillip Lopate