Kenneth Patchen Quotes & Sayings

Greatness and Truth can never be in danger from these murdering wretches. To perform one's duty, be it now, be it clean, and be it done with humility ... A man is a sacred thing. ANY ACTION OR THOUGHT WHICH INJURES THE HUMAN IMAGINATION IS EVIL. — Kenneth Patchen

Why should anyone be surprised at what the men "in power" are capable of --didn't every mad-Judas one of them begin his career by slowly & brutally strangling an innocent child? — Kenneth Patchen

Think enough and you won't know anything. — Kenneth Patchen

Then I felt her hand .... ** ....while I tried to get away ..... "Please, Mrs. Pippin!" .... She took her ... **** ... panting and saying .......... as she ........ under the bed where I thought I'd be safe for a little while, but she reached under and ... ** ..... Just then someone opened the door and I said, "Help!Help!" as loud as I could but he only smiled and said, "Well that's one I'll have to try sometime." as Mrs. Pippin .... — Kenneth Patchen

Gentle and giving-all the rest is treason. — Kenneth Patchen

What is the function of man? Surely the sheep can get along without him; horses run better wild; rifles make nothing; of what good are banks when ninety-nine percent of us have no money? - I have said: what are we on earth for? WE SERVE NO PURPOSE IN NATURE. It is my guess that we are slated for extinction. — Kenneth Patchen

Now is then's only tomorrow. — Kenneth Patchen

Literature is what you write when you think you should be saying something. Writing begins when you'd rather be doing anything else: and you've just done it. — Kenneth Patchen

I want to buy me a hat with a golden feather & a book with the confessions of God in it — Kenneth Patchen

Everyman is me. I am his brother. No man is my enemy. I am Everyman and he is in and of me. This is my faith, my strength, my deepest hope, and my only belief. — Kenneth Patchen

Law & order embrace on hate's border. — Kenneth Patchen

Dogs with broken legs are shot; men with broken souls write through the night. — Kenneth Patchen

Take taking from those that give & nobody anywhere will need any more such gifts. — Kenneth Patchen

The rest of the letters were pretty much the same as I got every day now. Two hundred and forty-six proposals, a number of them for marriage. Almost five hundred photographs taken in various stages of undress, the majority in the last. Several invitations to strange places where they wring the necks of chickens and take turns beating each other with whips, etc. (In case any of these correspondents may chance to read my book, I'd like to just say this to them: Doubtless you are sincere in what you do, but it does strike me that more useful pursuits could be found for grown people to spend their time at.) — Kenneth Patchen

That which is not daring is nothing. — Kenneth Patchen

In the love of a man and a woman is the look of God looking. — Kenneth Patchen

Any who live, stand alone in one place, together. — Kenneth Patchen

Stirred...the fur-toothed graves of young boys...a thousand slain in the time it would take to do love with a pretty girl or think of a new God. — Kenneth Patchen

Nobody's a long time. — Kenneth Patchen

There are so many little dyings How do we know which one of them is death? — Kenneth Patchen

People don't want to be healed. They want a nice juicy wound that will show well when they put neon lights around it. — Kenneth Patchen

Out of slavery, freedom --yes, & roses from the pig's behind. — Kenneth Patchen

The animal I wanted
Couldn't get into the world
I can hear it crying
When I sit like this away from life — Kenneth Patchen

Truth is always what they don't say. — Kenneth Patchen

God must have loved the People in Power, for he made them so very like their own image of him. — Kenneth Patchen

The best hope is that one of these days the ground will get disgusted enough just to walk away - leaving people with nothing more to stand on than what they have so bloody well stood for up to now. — Kenneth Patchen

Snow is the only one of us that leaves no tracks. — Kenneth Patchen

Law and order embrace on hate's border. — Kenneth Patchen

What shall light us to murder & defile if by some chance the Laws of the State happen to get turned off? — Kenneth Patchen

Ambition is the weakness of all the great spirits who in acceptance will find the joy & the despair the seek. The physician can only cure when he is willing to assume your disease. To be shunned is to be God a little... — Kenneth Patchen

You will protect with the last drop of someone else's blood what was never yours. — Kenneth Patchen

As We Are So Wonderfully Done with Each Other"

As we are so wonderfully done with each other
We can walk into our separate sleep
On floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood lies

O my lady, my fairest dear, my sweetest, loveliest one
Your lips have splashed my dull house with the speech of flowers
My hands are hallowed where they touched over your
soft curving.

It is good to be weary from that brilliant work
It is being God to feel your breathing under me

A waterglass on the bureau fills with morning . . .
Don't let anyone in to wake us. — Kenneth Patchen

'THIS ROOM HAS MYSTERY LIKE A TRANCE' This room has mystery like a trance Of wine ; forget-me-nots of you Are chair and couch, the books your Fingers touched. And now that you Are absent here the silence scrapes A secret rust from everything; While sudden wreaths of sorrow's Dust uncover emptiness like halls To stumble through, and terror falls — Kenneth Patchen

I think you will agree that I am alive in every part of this book; turn back twenty, thirty, one hundred pages - I am back there. That is why I hate the story; characters are not snakes that they must shed their skins on every page - there can only be one action: what a man is. When you have understood this, you will be through with novels. — Kenneth Patchen

For greatness is only the drayhorse that coaxes The built cart out; and where we go is reason. But genius is an enormous littleness, a trickling Of heart that covers alike the hare and the hunter. — Kenneth Patchen

In literature as in life, to conform to anything is to knuckle under to your inferiors. — Kenneth Patchen

Ah I can see that....
You can see anything once you've been told it's there to see — Kenneth Patchen

Modern scientific accomplishments" --a wealth of methods coupled with a poverty of intentions which, having nearly exhausted the hell-potential of the earth, move on now to the first frontier of the heavens. — Kenneth Patchen

Do I not deal with angels When her lips I touch. — Kenneth Patchen

Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest? — Kenneth Patchen

I think people need a little joy and humor as well as commitment in their lives — Kenneth Patchen

Man is not to direct or to be directed anymore than a tree or a cloud or a stone

Man is not to rule or be ruled anymore than a faith or a truth or a love

Man is not to doubt or to be doubted anymore than a wave or a seed or a fire

There is no problem in living which life hasn't answered to its own need

And we cannot direct, rule, or doubt what is beyond our highest ability to understand we can only be humble before it we can only worship ourselves because we are a part of it

The eye in the leaf is watching out of our fingers
The ear in the stone is listening through our voices
The thought of the wave is thinking in our dreams
The faith of the seed is building with our deaths — Kenneth Patchen

If the truth is inside,
And the form is outside,
What is the truth of sleep? — Kenneth Patchen

Why shouldn't you think it's crazy to believe in a green deer? All your life you have been taught to believe in only what you can use-to set on the table, to put in the bank, to build a house with. What possible use would a green deer be to anyone? Who would believe in a man with a blazing bush in his cart? Then let me tell you that it is beliefs just such as these that are the only hope of the world. Let me tell you that until men are ready to believe in the green deer and the strange carter, we shall not lift our noses above the bloody mess we have made of our living — Kenneth Patchen

All at Once Is What Eternity Is. — Kenneth Patchen

O take heart, my brothers. Even now ... with every leader & every resource & every strategy of every nation on Earth arrayed against Her - Even now, O even now, my brothers, Life is in no danger of losing the argument! - For after all ... (as will be shown) She has only to change the subject. — Kenneth Patchen

It's dark out, Jack, the stations out there don't identify themselves, we're in it raw-blind like burned rats, it's running out all around us, the footprints of the beast, one nobody has any notion of. The white and vacant eyes of something above there, something that doesn't know we exist. I smell heartbreak up there, Jack, a heartbreak at the center of things, and in which we don't figure at all. — Kenneth Patchen

I'd carry the mail for you, Ethel,
Stop running around with that pup,
He's got a car, sure, and jack to throw
Like water but what does he want?
What do they all want? something easy,
Something that somebody else worked for.
Ethel, lay off rich kids, you'll end dirty. — Kenneth Patchen

You look nice in those old slacks, but in the raw you are Beauty herself. — Kenneth Patchen

I don't consider myself to be a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend - give an extra dimension to - the medium of words. It happens very often my writing with a pen is interrupted with my writing with a brush - but I think of both as writing. — Kenneth Patchen

Art is not to throw light but to be light... — Kenneth Patchen

Destiny is the music of the improbable. Were it otherwise, almost anyone could exist. — Kenneth Patchen

It is the nature of man to expose with laws of doubt & impatience, no feeling of wonder that he should a participant in such an incredible undertaking; but rather the shameful certainty that what has been willed without him must in some way resemble the productions of his own sand-castle magnificence. — Kenneth Patchen

What is a 'thing'? All is movement, a flowing. How stupid it is to speak of the 'mind'. There is a body; there is a mind: they are mixed up together. Shakespeare with a hole in his sock will not write the sonnet of a Shakespeare with socks intact. — Kenneth Patchen

The angel lay in the little thicket. It had no need of love. There was nothing anywhere in the world could startle it. We can lie here with the angel if we like. It couldn't have hurt much when they slit its throat. — Kenneth Patchen

There are so many little dyings that it doesn't matter which of them is death. — Kenneth Patchen

The question is not: do we believe in God? but rather: does God believe in us? And the answer is: only an unbeliever could have created our image of God; and only a false God could be satisfied with it. — Kenneth Patchen

Our supper is plain but we are very wonderful. — Kenneth Patchen

I got the fat poet into a corner and told him he was writing shit and couldn't get away with it

Now it is night and time
for sleep. Everyone is
tired

from garbage-glutting
lifting their snouts
from the trough
long enough
to ease their gut -
I won't urge the point.

Gold-plated poems
to stuff up
their mind's ass

or politics
watered down so as
not to scare the blue bloods
Boo! you well-fed bastards — Kenneth Patchen

I tell you that what has changed is the whole conception of human life- that men of every race on this earth may have the same opportunity to live beautifully- to live in purity without fear or hunger or hatred- as brothers, not as brutes tearing through these hideous swamps of ignorance and war. Men speak of a belief in God. I am beginning to understand what every Christ- and their skins have been every color- what every Christ has taught: That love of God is love of mankind. That no one can profess to love God while he hates the least of his fellows. Jesus, if He were on earth right now, would fight to free men from oppression and evil and war; and you who have made a pious mockery of his every commandment- you would kill Him. — Kenneth Patchen

It is fully practical to create that which has form in the silence. The noise art makes is usually heard by those whose lives listen to god. It is not adviseable to cheat that which has no other stake than the deeps and brights of all man. — Kenneth Patchen

The one who comes to question himself cares for mankind. — Kenneth Patchen

This is the evening of the two-fisted prayer — Kenneth Patchen