Great Throughts Treasury

"Hoot how the inhuman colors fell into place beside her, where she was, like human conciliations, more like a profounder reconciling, an act, an affirmation free from doubt."

"Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf. This arrival in the wild country of the soul."

"His firm stanzas hang like hives in hell or what hell was, since now both heaven and hell are one, and here, o terra infidel."

"How clean the sun when seen in its idea, washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven that has expelled us and our images . . . The death of one god is the death of all. Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest, let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber."

"How cold the vacancy when the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist first sees reality. The mortal no has its emptiness and tragic expirations."

"Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container."

"How red the rose that is the soldier's wound, the wounds of many soldiers, the wounds of all the soldiers that have fallen, red in blood, the soldier of time grown deathless in great size."

"How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?"

"How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture."

"How does one stand to behold the sublime, to confront the mockers, the mickey mockers and plated pairs?"

"I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me."

"I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office."

"I can't make head or tail of life. Love is a fine thing, art is a fine thing, nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today."

"I am what is around me."

"I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after."

"I have finished my combat with the sun; and my body, the old animal, knows nothing more."

"I have said no to everything, in order to get at myself. I have wiped away moonlight like mud."

"I figured you as nude between monotonous earth and dark blue sky. It made you seem so small and lean."

"I sang a canto in a canton, cunning-coo, o, cuckoo cock, in a canton of belshazzar to belshazzar, putrid rock, pillar of a putrid people."

"I placed a jar in Tennessee, and round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness surround that hill."

"I measure myself against a tall tree. I find that I am much taller, for I reach right up to the sun, with my eye."

"I know my lazy, leaden twang is like the reason in a storm; and yet it brings the storm to bear. I twang it out and leave it there."

"I sing a hero's head, large eye and bearded bronze, but not a man, although I patch him as I can and reach through him almost to man."

"I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw or heard or felt came not but from myself; and there I found myself more truly and more strange."

"I thought how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes, barrens, wilds. It still dwarfs, terrifies, crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens, orchards and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless."

"I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw or heard or felt came not but from myself; and there I found myself more truly and more strange."

"If from the earth we came, it was an earth that bore us as a part of all the things it breeds and that was lewder than it is. Our nature is her nature. Hence it comes, since by our nature we grow old, earth grows the same. We parallel the mother's death."

"If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, the future might stop emerging out of the past, out of what is full of us; yet the search and the future emerging out of us seem to be one."

"If it were lost in übermenschlichkeit, perhaps our wretched state would soon come right."

"If in a shimmering room the babies came, drawn close by dreams of fledgling wing, it was because night nursed them in its fold."

"If her horny feet protrude, they come to show how cold she is, and dumb."

"If men at forty will be painting lakes the ephemeral blues must merge for them in one, the basic slate, the universal hue."

"If only he would not pity us so much, weaken our fate, relieve us of woe both great and small, a constant fellow of destiny, a too, too human god, self-pity's kin and uncourageous genesis."

"If sex were all, then every trembling hand could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words."

"If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution."

"If the stars that move together as one, disband, flying like insects of fire in a cavern of night, pipperoo, pippera, pipperum . . . The rest is rot."

"If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism."

"If the hero is not a person, the emblem of him, even if xenophon, seems to stand taller than a person stands, has a wider brow, large and less human eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body of a primitive."

"If these were only words that I am speaking indifferent sounds and not the heraldic-ho of the clear sovereign that is reality, of the clearest reality that is sovereign, how should I repeat them, keep repeating them."

"If the study of his images is the study of man, this image of Saturday, this Italian symbol, this southern landscape, is like a waking, as in images we awake, within the very object that we seek, participants of its being."

"Imagination is the will of things."

"If there is a man white as marble sits in a wood, in the greenest part, brooding sounds of the images of death, so there is a man in black space sits in nothing that we know, brooding sounds of river noises."

"If there must be a god in the house, let him be one that will not hear us when we speak: a coolness, a vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass of which we are too distantly a part."

"In a world of universal poverty the philosophers alone will be fat against the autumn winds in an autumn that will be perpetual."

"In contentment I still feel the need for imperishable bliss. Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires. Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? or do the boughs hang always heavy in that perfect sky, unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, with rivers like our own that seek for seas they never find, the same receding shores that never touch with inarticulate pang?"

"In Hydaspia, by Howzen, lived a lady, Lady Lowzen, for whom what is was other things."

"In his time, this one had little to speak of, the softest word went gurrituck in his skull. For him the moon was always in Scandinavia and his daughter was a foreign thing."

"In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American—on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion."

"In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all."

"In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; but when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud."