William Empson Quotes

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.

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.

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

The heart of standing is that you cannot fly.

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

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

The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

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

Poetry contains nothing haphazard.

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

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.