Allen Tate Quotes
37 quotes
in 550 categories
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Men expect too much, do too little.
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Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.
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How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of…
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Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
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A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them…
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At twelve I was determined to shoot only For honor; at twenty not to shoot at all; I know at thirty-three that one must shoot…
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The mission for the day is to encourage students to think beyond traditional career opportunities, prepare for future careers and entrance into the workplace.
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But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.
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The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!
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I believe the term modulation denotes in music the uninterrupted shift from one key to another: I do not know the term for change of…
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According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything…
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I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal…
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Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
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In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words…
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Among friends one has the privilege of saying nothing; the civility consists in the assumption that one's silence will be civilly understood. I can imagine…
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For some reason most critics have a hard time fixing their minds directly under their noses, and before they see the object that is there…
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Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
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Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.
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Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of…
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So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his…
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