Reznikoff Quotes & Sayings

I have a weird graphic I made for myself once, and it's the "lineage tree" of everyone that has inspired me and more importantly given me the permission to be myself in my work. There's a slew of people from theater: Erwin Piscator, Chekhov, Mac Wellman, Stein; and then a whole lot of wonderful works that are called novels: everything from Tristram Shandy to Bouvard and Pecuchet, to Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, and Finnegan's Wake and Invisible Man, and then contemporary writers I'm currently reading like Renee Gladman and Anakana Schofield. There are many more in my graphic also: there's Beckett's novels and Melancholy of Resistance, and there's Reznikoff and Dos Passos, there are contemporary poets I admire like Jena Osman, dance-writers like Michelle Ellsworth, and books I can't help read for fun like Muriel Spark. But there's Groucho Marx and Oscar Wilde. It's a huge question and the answers would likely change daily. But these I'm talking about here are in the pantheon. — Thalia Field

Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies/ a girder, still itself among the rubbish — Charles Reznikoff

The fingers of your thoughts are molding your face ceaselessly. — Charles Reznikoff

I will walk by myself
and cure myself
in the sunshine and the wind. — Charles Reznikoff

The street curves in and out, up and down in great waves of asphalt; at night the granite tomb is noisy with starlings like the creaking of many axles; only the tired walker know how much there is to climb, how the sidewalk curves into the cold wind. — Charles Reznikoff

The miracle, of course, was not that the oil for the sacred light - in a little cruse - lasted as long as they say; but that the courage of the Maccabees lasted to this day: let that nourish my flickering spirit. — Charles Reznikoff

There's nothing compared to the history of writing about the city of New York that you get, say, in Charles Reznikoff. — Stephen Vincent Benet

[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds ... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that. — Paul Auster