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. 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

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

George Oppen

#8. Bridal is very much a performance - it is the one grand event in every woman's life.

Austin Scarlett

#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. 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

#12. For the ones who dream of stranger worlds.

V.E Schwab

#13. When I first came to Hollywood, I used to dream of doing films and escaping television.

Billy Campbell

#14. Much of what we see in the universe ... starts out as imaginary. Often you must imagine something before you can come to terms with it.

Clifford D. Simak

#15. 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

#16. Things explain each other, not themselves.

George Oppen

#17. Sex is part of nature. I go along with nature.

Marilyn Monroe

#18. We are all frail-embodied creatures, who at times suffer through injustice, abuse, illness, pain and misfortune.

Bryant McGill

#19. 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

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

and I think there is light

George Oppen

#21. If the people are to be our governors, they must arm themselves with knowledge.

James Madison

#22. Being "married for a mission" can revitalize a lot of marriages in which the partners think they suffer from a lack of compatibility; my suspicion is that many of these couples actually suffer from a lack of purpose.

Gary L. Thomas

#23. the rich just bribe their way out. So yes, as far as the rulers are concerned, it works.

Iain M. Banks

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

George Oppen

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

George Oppen

#26. Once again, America finds itself with some leaders who believe we can ignore the world without consequences here at home. Apparently they're oblivious to the reality that we are less insulated from global events than ever before.

Marco Rubio

#27. I always tried to watch the pitcher and his complete windup from the moment he had the ball in his glove all the way through his motion, and tried to follow it all the way out of his hand, all the way to home plate.

Harmon Killebrew

#28. 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

#29. We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

John Updike

#30. Covering up, so far as I can see, is often the accompaniment to far more truly shameful behaviour than stripping off.

Julie Burchill

#31. [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

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

George Oppen

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

George Oppen

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

George Oppen

#35. 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

#36. 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

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

George Oppen

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

George Oppen