Delmore Schwartz Quotations

Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.

Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of love.

Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn.

The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible; he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.

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?

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

All poets' wives have rotten lives Their husbands look at them like knives.

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

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

To be the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe is in itself a special kind of experience; and an important one to an author. He has heard two languages through childhood, the one spoken with ease at home, and the other spoken with ease in the streets and at school, but spoken poorly at home.

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

I admired my father very much... at the age of sixteen. But now I see that he was a brutal and cruel man, - but not without remorse, and that was what tortured us, his alternations.

I am of Russian-Jewish distraction.

I got married the second time in the way that, when a murder is committed, crackpots turn up at the police station to confess the crime.

How could I think the brief years were enough To prove the reality of endless love?

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

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

Whence, if ever, shall come the actualityOf 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.

How the false truths of the years of youth have passed!Have passed at full speed like trains which never stoppedThere where I stood and waited, hardly aware,How little I knew, or which of them was the oneTo mount and ride to hope or where true hope arrives.

Literary Party: A traffic jam of the lost waiting for the ferry across the Styx.

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

I am a book I neither wrote nor read.

Poetry must be as new as foam & old as rock.

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

At the moment I'm so exhausted that I feel like cutting my throat, so the next news masy well be that I am across the river and under the trees: what is the meaning and purpose of life? Death.

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 againThe smallest color of the smallest day:Time is the school in which we learn,Time is the fire in which we burn.

Where the light is, and each thing clear,Separate from all others, standing in its place,I drink the time and touch whatever's near,And hope for day when the whole world has that face:For what assures her present every year?In dark accidents the mind's sufficient grace.

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.

O your life, your lonely lifeWhat have you ever done with it,And done with the great gift of consciousness?What will you ever do before Death's knifeProvides the answer ultimate and appropriate?As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feels the vastDraft of the abyss sucking him down and down,An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:This is the way the night passes by, thisIs the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.

Even paranoids have real enemies.

I should like you to consider this letter as a resignation; I want to resign as one of your most studious and faithful admirers.