Top 22 Phillip Lopate Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Gratitude isn't a tool to manipulate the universe or God. It's a way to acknowledge our faith that everything happens for a reason even if we don't know what that reason is. ~Melody Beattie, 52 Weeks of Conscious Contact, pg. 34.
Melody Beattie
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.
Florence Nightingale
#8. The thing about movies now is in a way what it always was: The screen is huge and now the sound systems are too. And you never get that with TV. Even with a home system, it's never the same.
David Chase
#10. 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
#11. I like the freedom that comes with lowered expectations.
Phillip Lopate
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. A strong Protectionist, believes
In everything but Heaven.
For entertainment, dines, receives,
Unmarried, 57.
Hilaire Belloc
#15. My phone rang, and although it wasn't a sinister time of night, and although nothing had happened that I would later see as foreshadowing, I knew, I knew.
Hanya Yanagihara
#16. 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
#17. The knowledge that my discriminations are skewed and not always universally desirable doesn't stop me in the least from making them.
Phillip Lopate
#18. There is no significant idea which cannot be explained to an intelligent twelve year old boy in fifteen minutes.
Leo Tolstoy
#19. 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
#20. As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor stated, even a state of war is not a blank check for a president to do whatever he wants.
Edward Kennedy
#21. Security is something that serves Israeli interests and Palestinian interests. You have a common threat and you have a common enemy and it's important to deal with that as partners.
Dennis Ross
#22. Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
- Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library
Phillip Lopate
