Empson Quotes & Sayings

The heart of standing is that you cannot fly. — William Empson

The effect of reading literary non-fiction that matters most to me is when the coin drops, and this happens in the company of the great, mercuric, encyclopedic minds: Empson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye. — Paul Fry

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills. — William Empson

All those large dreams by which men long live well Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell. — William Empson

Buddhists and Christians contrive to agree about death Making death their ideal basis for different ideals. The Communists however disapprove of death Except when practical. — William Empson

I'm a modern woman in the sense of I take care of myself, I'm fiercely independent, and I'm really ambitious. Yet I have these old-school thoughts in my mind. — Eva Mendes

Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is — Rob Pike

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men. — William Empson

The difficult part of good temper consists in forbearance, and accommodation to the ill-humors of others. — William Empson

To produce pure proletarian art the artist must be at one with the worker; this is impossible, not for political reasons, but because the artist never is at one with any public. — William Empson

I love Winston Churchill. I love the wisdom he had, the sagacity. I like people who are independent-minded. People who aren't part of clans or systems, who are talented and free, and able to do things without being corrupted by the system. — Lapo Elkann

This world is good enough for me, if only I can be good enough for it. — William Empson

Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis. — William Empson

Liberal hopefulness Regards death as a mere border to an improving picture. — William Empson

I'm afraid I take ... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been. — William Empson

You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there. — William Empson

I wasn't ready for goodbye, not now, not yet. Stay with me tonight, please don't go just yet. — Anya

The heart of standing is you cannot fly. — William Empson

I think many people (like myself) prefer to read poetry mixed with prose;
it gives you more to go by; the conventions of poetry have been getting
far off from normal life, so that to have a prose bridge makes
reading poetry seem more natural. — William Empson

Shall I make it clear, boys, for all to apprehend, Those that will not hear, boys, waiting for the end, Knowing it is near, boys, trying to pretend, Sitting in cold fear, boys, waiting for the end? — William Empson

My heart pumps yet the poison draught of you. — William Empson

It seems unpleasantly refined to put things off till someone knows. — William Empson

Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves; Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems; Earth's vast hot iron, cold space's empty waves. — William Empson

I had five years in the business in Canada, and then I came down to the States in February of 2010. I had a good pilot season. I started getting guest star work. I started to get bigger stuff. — Stephen Amell

Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry — William Empson

Proust has listed a great many reasons why it is impossible to be happy, but, in the course of being happy, one finds it difficult to remember them. — William Empson

I wrote an entire movie [Man up] about how important I think voices are, so it was funny. — Lake Bell

Poetry contains nothing haphazard. — William Empson

If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name — Anne Carson

The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry. — William Empson

We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more quadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are. — Kim Stanley Robinson

When Jesus went to his disciples on the evening of his resurrection, the first thing he said to them was, "Peace be with you." That has not changed. When you are in the presence of God, you are in a place of peace. Peace comes from the presence of someone who made you in love and keeps you in grace, someone you can count on to be with you in all things. When you are in God's presence, you are with one who knows you better than anyone does and who wants you to have the best life has to offer. In such a presence you have an inner calm that exceeds human understanding and measurement. — Lila Empson

I would browse for half an hour or so in the secondhand bookstores in the neighborhood. Owning my own 'library' was my only materialistic ambition; in fact, trying to decide which two of these thousands of books to buy that week, I would frequently get so excited that by the time the purchase was accomplished I had to make use of the bookseller's toilet facilities. I don't believe that either microbe or laxative has ever affected me so strongly as the discovery that I was all at once the owner of a slightly soiled copy of Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity in the original English edition. — Philip Roth

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own. — William Empson