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You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.

Archibald MacLeish

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Archibald MacLeish
Age: 89 †
Born: 1892
Born: May 7
Died: 1982
Died: April 20
Lawyer
Librarian
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
University Teacher
Writer
Glencoe
Illinois
London
City
Cities
Felt
House
Houses
Burned
Flames

More quotes by Archibald MacLeish

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A poem should not mean but be.
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The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.
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Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.
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What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
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Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world.
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Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
Archibald MacLeish
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It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.
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The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.
Archibald MacLeish
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Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.
Archibald MacLeish
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How shall freedom be defended? By arms when it is attacked by arms, by truth when it is attacked by lies, by faith when it is attacked by authoritarian dogma. Always, in the final act, by determination and faith.
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The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man's face would make you think of it but his hope might, his courage might.
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A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
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If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.
Archibald MacLeish
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There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
Archibald MacLeish
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The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
Archibald MacLeish
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Children know the grace of god better than most of us. They see the world the way the morning brings it back to them new and born and fresh and wonderful.
Archibald MacLeish
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Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.
Archibald MacLeish
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The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
Archibald MacLeish
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The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.
Archibald MacLeish
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As things are now going the peace we make, what peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace in brief.without moral purpose or human interest.
Archibald MacLeish