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A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.

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
Birds
Poem
Flight
Bird
Wordless

More quotes by Archibald MacLeish

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Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.
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Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.
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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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America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
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There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
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Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
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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
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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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Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
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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.
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The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.
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Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.
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That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.
Archibald MacLeish
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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
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Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
Archibald MacLeish
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What is wrong is not the great discoveries of science—information is always better than ignorance, no matter what information or what ignorance. What is wrong is the belief behind the information, the belief that information will change the world. It won’t.
Archibald MacLeish
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You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
Archibald MacLeish
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See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
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.
Archibald MacLeish
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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.
Archibald MacLeish