William Empson Quotes

15 quotes in 179 categories

• The heart of standing is that you cannot fly.
• It seems unpleasantly refined to put things off till someone knows.
• Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.
• Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
• Proust has listed a great many reasons why it is impossible to be happy, but, in the course of being happy, one finds it difficult…
• Poetry contains nothing haphazard.
• The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.
• This world is good enough for me, if only I can be good enough for it.
• Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more…
• Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.
• The difficult part of good temper consists in forbearance, and accommodation to the ill-humors of others.
• The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
• Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.
• My heart pumps yet the poison draught of you.
• You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there.

Browse William Empson Quotes by Category