Guy Davenport Quotes

20 quotes in 374 categories

• Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.
• Something of the previous state, however, survives every change. This is called in the language of cybernetics (which took it form the language of machines)…
• The birds suffer their suffering each in a lifetime, forgetting it as they go.
• Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.
• A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.
• We will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture's way of developing an individual.
• There are many objects of desire, and therefore many desires. Some are born with us, hunger, yearning, and pride of place, and some are the…
• In curved Einsteinian space we are at all times, technically, looking at the back of our own head.
• It is worthwhile adding that the power of the poem to teach not only sensibilities and the subtle movements of the spirit but knowledge, real…
• I’ve carved the puppet, and I manipulate the strings, but while it’s on stage, the show belongs to the puppet.
• Originality houses many rooms, and the views from the windows are all different.
• When Heraclitus said that everything passes steadily along, he was not inciting us to make the best of the moment, an idea unseemly to his…
• The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre…
• I never intended to be a teacher. I just like going to school and learning things.
• Imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch and must get drunk again to find it.
• I was thought to be retarded as a child, and all the evidence indicates that I was.
• I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.
• The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip…
• Art knows neither doctrine nor idea; its nature is to show.
• Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which…

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