Top 42 Rexroth Quotes
#1. The basic line in any good verse is cadenced ... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.
Kenneth Rexroth
#2. Love slays what we have been,
That we may be what we were not.
Kenneth Rexroth
#3. Victorian society was homogeneous without being homogenized. It was, to paraphrase the epigram about Parliament, a society of extreme eccentrics who agreed so well that they could afford to differ.
Kenneth Rexroth
#4. There have always been those who, though they see tragedy as the outcome of freedom, will nevertheless judge that tragedy is not too high a price to pay.
Kenneth Rexroth
#5. Any talented decadent can make unreality believable. To make reality convincing is another matter, a matter for only the greatest masters.
Kenneth Rexroth
#6. Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, What man does with his aloneness.
Kenneth Rexroth
#7. You learn nothing if you carry with you a journalistic system of values, which is invented to save reporters from experience.
Kenneth Rexroth
#8. Lost in loneliness and pain. Black and unendurable, Thinking of you with every Corpuscle of my flesh, in Every instant of night And day.
Kenneth Rexroth
#9. Marriage is the last sacrament available to modern man, and with the terrible destruction of interpersonal relations by capitalism and its war-making State, it is not very available, nor is it surely enduring. But then, vision does not come with guarantees.
Kenneth Rexroth
#10. Harvey , Galileo , Copernicus do not seem occult to us, but they did so to their contemporaries, hierophants of the mysteries of Natural Law, revealers of the secrets of a New Order of the Ages. After all, the movement eventually came to be called the Age of Enlightenment.
Kenneth Rexroth
#11. I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. [ ... ] I wish to speak to and for those who have had enough of the Social Lie, the Economics of Mass Murder, the Sexual Hoax, and the Domestication of Conspicuous Consumption.
Kenneth Rexroth
#12. Bohemia is a commune in which the Revolution is over and everyone is a member of the aristocracy
Kenneth Rexroth
#13. This isn't the best town for what we're doing. Too many other things to pull the crowds away.
Kenneth Rexroth
#14. With my own group I like to keep it loose. They have to counter rather than go with me. When they stop I like to be moving.
Kenneth Rexroth
#15. It is a commonplace that Racine is untranslatable. This is not because his verse is difficult, but because it is not.
Kenneth Rexroth
#16. Crooked cards and straight whiskey,
Slow horses and fast women.
Kenneth Rexroth
#17. When the newspapers have got nothing else to talk about, they cut loose on the young. The young are always news. If they are up to something, that's news. If they aren't, that's news too.
Kenneth Rexroth
#18. Ex-cons always say, "You never know what makes the wheels go round until you've done time in the joint." This is even more true of psychiatric hospitals. It is a perfect mass hypostatization of society, the organization of the Social Lie.
Kenneth Rexroth
#19. The modern sensibility attempts to drain the contents of experience; these Greek poets strive to state the fact so poignantly that it becomes an ever-flowing spring as Sappho says, More real than real, more gold than gold.
Kenneth Rexroth
#20. The holiness of the real
Is always there, accessible
In total immanence. The nodes
Of transcendence coagulate
In you, the experiencer,
And in the other, the lover.
Kenneth Rexroth
#22. Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense - the creative act.
Kenneth Rexroth
#23. Japanese poetry does what poetry does everywhere: it intensifies and exalts experience.
Kenneth Rexroth
#24. The mature man lives quietly, does good privately, takes responsibility for his actions, treats others with friendliness and courtesy, finds mischief boring and avoids it. Without the hidden conspiracy of goodwill, society would not endure an hour.
Kenneth Rexroth
#25. Perhaps this is what really happens in life to most good men. They are not crucified. They simply pass through life and then die, and their passing influences just a few people to make them just a little happy.
Kenneth Rexroth
#26. Making love with you
Is like drinking sea water.
The more I drink
The thirstier I become,
Until nothing can slake my thirst
But to drink the entire sea.
Kenneth Rexroth
#27. The free, creative, loving people who shine so brightly in my memory of studios and coffee shops have become models for a huge section of the population. If they in turn can just stay alive in the face of power and terror, they may become the decisive section.
Kenneth Rexroth
#28. Maturity is having the ability to escape categorization.
Kenneth Rexroth
#29. Men who live like Casanova are seldom interested in themselves; their egocentricity does not give them time for egotism.
Kenneth Rexroth
#30. Mary, my little girl, was confirmed in a Buddhist temple. She saw the Life write up on Buddhism, with pictures of the ceremony, and she said she wanted to be confirmed there because she only liked Jesus as a kid. She was a little disappointed in him when he grew up.
Kenneth Rexroth
#31. Man thrives where angels would die of ecstasy and where pigs would die of disgust.
Kenneth Rexroth
#32. Did you know I staged the first performance in America of At the Hawk's Well?
Kenneth Rexroth
#33. As Aristotle said, you have to be an aristocrat or a reactionary to write a good proletarian poem.
Kenneth Rexroth
#34. Erotic love is one of the highest forms of contemplation.
Kenneth Rexroth
#35. You don't become a saint until you lead a good life whether in Tibet or Italy or America.
Kenneth Rexroth
#37. I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.
Kenneth Rexroth
#38. I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.
Kenneth Rexroth
#41. It takes great labor to uncover the convincing simple speech of the heart. Poetic candor comes with hard labor, so even does impetuosity and impudence.
Kenneth Rexroth
#42. The meaning of life can be revealed but never explained.
Kenneth Rexroth
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