Goldbarth Quotes & Sayings

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life. — Charles Baudelaire

If you agree with me that a poem can be as bountiful as a rich Victorian narrative, and as wise ... then you'll want to join me here in the Wow, I Like No Need of Sympathy Club. Your membership fee is the same as your membership privileges: this book. — Albert Goldbarth

FOR NEARLY THIRTY years, the One who had crafted the universe with His voice crafted furniture with His hands. And He was good at what He did - no crooked table legs ever came out of the carpenter's shop in Nazareth.1 But Jesus was more than a master carpenter. He was also God incognito. His miraculous powers rank as history's best-kept secret for nearly three decades, but all that changed the day water blushed in the face of its Creator. — Mark Batterson

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course you're tired. Every atom in you has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes nonstop from mitosis to now. Quit tapping your feet. They'll dance inside themselves without you. — Albert Goldbarth

I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary - a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing. — Albert Goldbarth

He comes.
And he comes
loaded
with noise pollution.
If I ever prayed for anything,
it was for a man
to shut up. — Casey Renee Kiser

I don't spend time thinking about an aesthetic out of which I create or an ideal toward which my body of work is heading. It's amazing, when I read interviews with other poets, to see how articulately they discuss their own writing, as if they were sharing long-held theories on the work of Pope or Keats. I'm happy enough that I've poured the best of myself into the poems themselves. — Albert Goldbarth

I have no idea, actually, where I fit in, in terms of poetry camps. At AWP conferences, I have been on panels about humor, collaboration, visual poetry, confessional poetry, gender, and the body, as well as tributes to Edward Field and Albert Goldbarth. I felt at home on all of them - most poets straddle more than one school. — Denise Duhamel

The grave is a very small hillock, but we can see farther from it, when standing on it, than from the highest mountain in all the world. — August Tholuck

The difference between reading a story and studying a story is the difference between living the story and killing the story and looking at its guts. — Cory Doctorow

Alec Baldwin made us all feel like [we could] pal around with him and come up with the best scenarios or scenarios if you're a f - king asshole. So working with him was Alec Baldwin does it the best. — Kate Hudson

Talk to me. I'll believe anything. — Albert Goldbarth

Perhaps you have seen me. I know well, my purpose was merely that of a symbol, 'equals', 'times' ... ; but what is said, for all that, was identity-less: a kind of live geometry. — Albert Goldbarth

I will take a draft to the Yankees or to the Mets. A draft for president is not conceivable. — Mario Cuomo

If anarchists are idealists, they may simply be likened to someone who finds himself swimming in a cesspool and, rather than paddling about looking for the area with the least amount of floating faeces, seeks to climb out of the pool completely. — Robert Higgs

The reason why the Son of God took upon him our nature, was, the fall of our first parents. — George Whitefield

'Tammy,' the new movie starring, produced, and co-written by Melissa McCarthy, could be an artifact from some alternate universe: the creatures there resemble Earthlings but have an entirely different and debased idea of what's funny. — Richard Corliss

The children will need new stories and fairy tales to see them through their nightmares and daydreams, to transfigure their sorrows and fears at not being able to remain children forever. — Keith Donohue

Germany's amongst my top three places in the world I'd like to live. — Jonah Hill