Oppen Quotes & Sayings

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity. — George Oppen

A discrete series is a series of terms each of which is empirically derived, each one of which is empirically true. And this is the reason for the fragmentary character of those poems. — George Oppen

It is necessary to study these words you have written, for the words have a longer history than you have and say more than you know. — George Oppen

In these explanations it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world.'

the rain falls
that had not been falling
and it is the same world — George Oppen

The self is no mystery, the mystery is / That there is something for us to stand on — George Oppen

Only one mistake, Ezra! You should have talked to women. — George Oppen

Thou has a thousand eyes and yet not one eye; Thou host a thousand forms and yet not one form. — Guru Nanak

God speaks to us by speaking through us, and any meaning we arrive at in this life is composed of the irreducible details of the life that is around us at any moment. "I think there is no light in the world / but the world," writes George Oppen. "And I think there is light. — Christian Wiman

Boy's Room"

A friend saw the rooms
Of Keats and Shelley
At the lake, and saw 'they were just
Boys' rooms' and was moved

By that. And indeed a poet's room
Is a boy's room
And I suppose that women know it.

Perhaps the unbeautiful banker
Is exciting to a woman, a man
Not a boy gasping
For breath over a girl's body — George Oppen

Imitation is criticism. — William Blake

Fear tolerated is faith contaminated. — Kenneth Copeland

Among days// Having only the force/ Of days//Most simple/ Most difficult — George Oppen

George Oppen wasn't a larger than life personality, but I'm not either. And he lived a long time, so he was happy. Going down in flames is fine, too. — Stephen Malkmus

My wife is a big fan of George Oppen and I got into him. I could have a career like his. It's not an alpha male situation, George Oppen. It's quiet. It's poetry.He just lived a life of an intellectual poet. — Stephen Malkmus

I lost in the 1988 Olympics, and I was pretty depressed for about eight years. I quit wrestling, and I got into Brazilian jujitsu in 1991. — Mark Schultz

When the hammer strikes a nail, the extreme force of the blow on the broad head is transmitted without loss to the point. The head of the nail is the whole of eternity and the point of that nail is pressed to the center of the human heart. " [ quoting Simone Weil from memory ] — George Oppen

I was slight in frame and lacked the instant authoritarian standing that a Winchester did. — Jon Bassoff

He's flying through Norway. Notice the fjords I created with hundreds of individually cut-out gray mosaic pieces? It's daylight there in the winter, it would be untruthful to have the night sky be so dark. — Felicia Day

I think there is no light in the world
but the world

and I think there is light — George Oppen

Things explain each other, not themselves. — George Oppen

I guess you can call me "old fashioned". I prefer the book with the pages that you can actually turn. Sure, I may have to lick the tip of my fingers so that the pages don't stick together when I'm enraptured in a story that I can't wait to get to the next page. But nothing beats the sound that an actual, physical book makes when you first crack it open or the smell of new, fresh printed words on the creamy white paper of a page turner. — Felicia Johnson

Could the two people who are making out please be quiet?" the Colonel asked loudly from his sleeping bag. "Those of us who are not making out are drunk and tired. — John Green

Truth, also is the pursuit of it. — George Oppen

What I like more than anything is to visit other islands... — George Oppen

A Concordance of Leaves is an epic poem of the indomitable yet fragile human spirit. Philip Metres brings Palestine and Palestinians into English with rare luminosity. One feels echoes of Oppen's succinct tenderness in the depiction of the numerous characters of this work. Without other, there is no self. And that other is the stranger who must be loved. Concordance is, after all, a wedding poem-leaves and pages in search of a certain passage toward harmony. — Fady Joudah

An Allosaurus backbone had a hole in which a Stegosaurus thagomizer fitted perfectly. Over the years, many of the fossil thagomizers that have been dug up have had broken tips. — Gary Jeffrey

[It is not] the poet's business to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth. — George Oppen

The situation of the Old Left was the theory of Socialist Realism, etc. It seemed pointless to argue. We stayed carefully away from people who wrote for the New Masses. — George Oppen

A pure mathematical series would be one in which each term is derived from the preceding term by a rule. — George Oppen

There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art. — George Oppen

As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy. — Paul Auster

The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines. — George Oppen

George Oppen is a tough old bird. If you've never seen what [he] sees, it's because you haven't sat still long enough and looked as he has. The things he sees feel like the gnarled bark of a tree. The tree is there too. You can put your weight against it. It won't give. — Carl Rakosi

The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity. — George Oppen

Forbid me not to weep; he was my father;
And, had you lov'd him half so well as I,
You could not bear his death thus patiently. — Christopher Marlowe

Ultimately the air
Is bare sunlight where must be found
The lyric valuable. — George Oppen

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves. — George Oppen

Race to race, the Republicans are putting up candidates that are quite far out of the mainstream in terms of should we have passed the Civil Rights Act or does Social Security need to exist. — Tim Kaine

Death changes things. It changes how we think about people; it changes the living and it changes the dead. — Martin Sixsmith