Edward Hirsch Quotes

16 quotes in 390 categories

• A hook shot kisses the rim and hangs there, helplessly, but doesn't drop and for once our gangly starting center boxes out his man and…
• ...I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood…
• Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.
• Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark…
• I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves
• In Náhuatl, the language of the Aztec world, one key word for poet was 'tlamatine,' meaning 'the one who knows,' or 'he who knows something.'…
• Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses…
• I have tried to remember throughout that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It is a bloody art. It lives on a human scale…
• Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in…
• One of the deep fundamentals of poetry is the recurrence of sounds, syllables, words, phrases, lines, and stanzas. Repetition can be one of the most…
• Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.
• Civil religion gives American culture its direction and defines its fundamental values, but it does not determine the diversified contents of American national culture.
• We will be able to achieve a just and prosperous society only when our schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared background knowledge to be…
• Television watching does reduce reading and often encroaches on homework. Much of it is admittedly the intellectual equivalent of junk food. But in some respects,…
• Cafeteria-style education, combined with the unwillingness of our schools to place demands on students, has resulted in a steady diminishment of commonly shared information between…
• Books and newspapers assume a "common reader" that is, a person who knows the things known by other literate persons in the culture. Obviously, such…

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