Delmore Schwartz Quotes

O your life, your lonely lifeWhat have you ever done with it,And done with the great gift of consciousness?What will you ever do before Death's knifeProvides the answer ultimate and appropriate?As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feels the vastDraft of the abyss sucking him down and down,An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:This is the way the night passes by, thisIs the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.

I am a book I neither wrote nor read.

Order and disorder, form and formless must have profound psychological roots, nervous roots.

I am of Russian-Jewish distraction.

I always cause those who are near to me more suffering than pleasure.

What does long life avail? The best seats at the funerals of friends.

Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn.

I got married the second time in the way that, when a murder is committed, crackpots turn up at the police station to confess the crime.

All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.

Literary Party: A traffic jam of the lost waiting for the ferry across the Styx.

Is it not clear that a reviewer's psyche, like an iceberg, is seven-eighths beneath the surface?

I admired my father very much... at the age of sixteen. But now I see that he was a brutal and cruel man, - but not without remorse, and that was what tortured us, his alternations.

Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.

Major writing is to say that which has been seen, so that it need never be said again; so that which has been seen increases, changes in reality, in being.

The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible; he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.

What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?

At the moment I'm so exhausted that I feel like cutting my throat, so the next news masy well be that I am across the river and under the trees: what is the meaning and purpose of life? Death.

Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of love.

Even paranoids have real enemies.

Poetry must be as new as foam & old as rock.

Literature doesn't matter! The only thing that matters is money and getting your teeth fixed!