Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
To write is a humiliation.
The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.
Look at this poet William Carlos Williams: he is primitive and native, and his roots are in raw forest and violent places; he is word-sick and place-crazy. He admires strength, but for what? Violence! This is the cult of the frontier mind.
Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man; he was certainly a drumbling one.
What is most appalling in an F. Scott Fitzgerald book is that it is peopleless fiction: Fitzgerald writes about spectral, muscledsuits; dresses, hats, and sleeves which have some sort of vague, libidinous throb. These are plainly the product of sickness.
We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.
It is hideous and coarse to assume that we can do something for others-and it is vile not to endeavor to do it.
Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.
Man is at the nadir of his stregth when the Earth, the seas, the mountains are not in him, for without them his soul is unsourced, and he has no images by which to abide.
We are uneasy with an affectionate man, for we are positive he wants something of us, particularly our love.
One of the weaknesses in the cooperative is that it has never been sufficiently leavened by the imagination. This is a quick-silver faculty, and likely to be a cause of worry to any collective settlement.
Of all the animals on earth, none is so brutish as man when he seeks the delirium of coition.
Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics.
Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.
Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.
The newspaper has debauched the American until he is a slavish, simpering, and angerless citizen; it has taught him to be a lump mass-man toward fraud, simony, murder, and lunacies more vile than those of Commodus or Caracalla.
Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.
Everything ultimately fails, for we die, and that is either the penultimate failure or our most enigmatical achievement.