Quote

Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.

Archibald MacLeish

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Poet
Hurt
Word
Squeeze
Men
Literal
Minded
Hurts
Poets
Till

More quotes by Archibald MacLeish

Image
The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
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
Image
What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only, that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off
Archibald MacLeish
Image
The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
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.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
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
Image
Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
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.
Archibald MacLeish
Image
History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.
Archibald MacLeish