Delmore Schwartz Quotes

Delmore Schwartz presents lyrical, introspective thoughts on time, identity and self.

18 quotes

1. Each minute bursts in the burning room, The great globe reels in the solar fire, Spinning the trivial and unique away. (How all things flash! How all things flare!) What am I now that I was then? May memory restore again and again The smallest color of the smallest day: Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.

2. I am my father's father, You are your children's guilt. In history's pity and terror The child is Aeneas again; Troy is in the nursery, The rocking horse is on fire. Child labor! The child must carry His fathers on his back.

3. A car coughed, starting. Morning softly Melting the air, lifted the half-covered chair From underseas, kindled the looking-glass, Distinguished the dresser and the white wall. The bird called tentatively, whistled, called, Bubbled and whistled, so! Perplexed, still wet With sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold. So, so, O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail Of early morning, the mystery of the beginning Again and again, while history is unforgiven.

4. Whence, if ever, shall come the actuality Of a voice speaking the mind's knowing, The sunlight bright on the green windowshade, And the self articulate, affectionate, and flowing, Ease, warmth, light, the utter showing, When in the white bed all things are made.

5. But this, this which we say before we're sorry, This which we live behind our unseen faces, Is neither dream, nor childhood, neither Myth, nor landscape, final, nor finished, For we are incomplete and know no future, And we are howling or dancing out our souls In beating syllables before the curtain: We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.

6. That inescapable animal walks with me, Has followed me since the black womb held, Moves where I move, distorting my gesture, A caricature, a swollen shadow, A stupid clown of the spirit's motive, Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness, The secret life of belly and bone.

7. Sometimes even paranoids have enemies.

8. What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?

9. I always cause those who are near to me more suffering than pleasure.

10. Love is the tact of every good, The only warmth, the only peace.

11. I am a book I neither wrote nor read.

12. Literature doesn't matter! The only thing that matters is money and getting your teeth fixed!

13. Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.

14. What does long life avail? The best seats at the funerals of friends.

15. Is it not clear that a reviewer's psyche, like an iceberg, is seven-eighths beneath the surface?

16. Order and disorder, form and formless must have profound psychological roots, nervous roots.

17. And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous, He must die a little death each morning, He must swallow his toad and study his vomit as Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.

18. All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.