Delmore Schwartz Quotes & Sayings

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. — Delmore Schwartz

Sometimes even paranoids have enemies. — Delmore Schwartz

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. — Delmore Schwartz

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. — Delmore Schwartz

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. — Delmore Schwartz

At This Moment Of Time

Some who are uncertain compel me. They fear
The Ace of Spades. They fear
Loves offered suddenly, turning from the mantelpiece,
Sweet with decision. And they distrust
The fireworks by the lakeside, first the spuft,
Then the colored lights, rising.
Tentative, hesitant, doubtful, they consume
Greedily Caesar at the prow returning,
Locked in the stone of his act and office.
While the brass band brightly bursts over the water
They stand in the crowd lining the shore
Aware of the water beneath Him. They know it. Their eyes
Are haunted by water

Disturb me, compel me. It is not true
That "no man is happy," but that is not
The sense which guides you. If we are
Unfinished (we are, unless hope is a bad dream),
You are exact. You tug my sleeve
Before I speak, with a shadow's friendship,
And I remember that we who move
Are moved by clouds that darken midnight — Delmore Schwartz

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

Poetry must be as new as foam & old as rock. — Delmore Schwartz

For reality's glow and glory, without poetry,
Fade, like the red operas of sunset — Delmore Schwartz

Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
(Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day) — Delmore Schwartz

In this our life there are no beginnings but only departures entitled beginnings, wreathed in the formal emotions thought to be appropriate and often forced. Darkly rises each moment from the life which has been lived and which does not die, for each event lives in the heavy head forever, waiting to renew itself. — Delmore Schwartz

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

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,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear,
Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,
Amid the hundred million of his kind,
The scrimmage of appetite everywhere. — Delmore Schwartz

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. — Delmore Schwartz

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. — Delmore Schwartz

Call us what you will: we are made such by love. — Delmore Schwartz

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

I am a book I neither wrote nor read. — Delmore Schwartz

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? — Delmore Schwartz

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. — Delmore Schwartz

I am of Russian-Jewish distraction. — Delmore Schwartz

Even paranoids have real enemies. — Delmore Schwartz

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

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

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. — Delmore Schwartz

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. — Delmore Schwartz

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Delmore Schwartz

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

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

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

No," said Jacob, "I don't mean to say that this life is just a party, any kind of party. It is a wedding, the most important kind of party, full of joy, fear, hope, and ignorance. And at this party there are enough places and parts for everyone, and if no one can play every part, yet everyone can come to the party, everyone can come to the wedding feast, and anyone who does not know that he is at a wedding feast just does not see what is in front of him. He might as well be dead if he does not know that the world is a wedding. — Delmore Schwartz

O your life, your lonely life
What have you ever done with it,
And done with the great gift of consciousness?
What will you ever do before Death's knife
Provides 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 vast
Draft of the abyss sucking him down and down,
An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:
This is the way the night passes by, this
Is the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss. — Delmore Schwartz