David Lehman Quotes

9 quotes in 184 categories

• The best song lyrics seem to me so artful, so brilliant, so warm and humorous, with both passion and wit, that my admiration is matched…
• Words have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbits and enter a wider magnetic field. No one…
• Obscurantism is the academic theorist's revenge on society for having consigned him or her to relative obscurity - a way of proclaiming one's superiority in…
• Jargon is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to…
• There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it…
• Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the…
• If you have too good a time writing hostile reviews, you'll injure not only your sensibility but your soul.
• If you're not paying for it through the health plan, you pay for it in the emergency room.
• Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No…

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